Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou is a Greek Cypriot entrepreneur. Born into a wealthy ship-owning family, he is best known for founding the low-cost airline easyJet and the Stelmar shipping line with start-up funds provided by his father, Loucas. easyJet's foundation in 1995 marked the beginning of a series of ventures marketed under the "easy" brand, managed by easyGroup and chaired by Haji-Ioannou.
Amoco Cadiz was a VLCC owned by Amoco Transport Corp and transporting crude oil for Shell Oil. Operating under the Liberian flag, she ran aground on 16 March 1978 on Portsall Rocks, 2 km (1.2 mi) from the coast of Brittany, France. Ultimately she split in three and sank, resulting in the largest oil spill of its kind in history to that date.
SS Torrey Canyon was an LR2 Suezmax class oil tanker with a cargo capacity of 118,285 long tons (120,183 t) of crude oil. She ran aground off the western coast of Cornwall, United Kingdom, on 18 March 1967, causing an environmental disaster. At that time she was the largest vessel ever to be wrecked.
EasyCruise was a cruise line of Greek ferry operator Hellenic Seaways. It was sold to them in August 2009 for £9 million by founder and Cypriot/British business man, Stelios Haji-Ioannou. They launched their first cruise ship EasyCruiseOne in 2005. Unlike other cruise lines, EasyCruise's business model offered passengers an inexpensive no-frills vacation with a la carte pricing for on board food and services. EasyCruise ended operations in early 2010.
The MV Sea Empress was a single-hull Suezmax oil tanker that ran aground at the entrance to the Milford Haven harbour on the southwest coast of Wales in February 1996. The ensuing oil spill, Britain's third largest oil spillage and the 12th largest in the world at the time, devastated a considerable area of local coastline and killed many birds, and continued to affect the Pembrokeshire coast for years afterwards.
USAT Brigadier General M. G. Zalinski was a U.S. Army transport ship that served in World War II. It sank in 1946 in the Grenville Channel in British Columbia's Inside Passage. The crew were rescued by a tug boat and the SS Catala passenger steamer, but the cargo of bombs and oil went down with the ship.
MT Independența ("Independence") was a large Romanian crude oil carrier. She collided in 1979 with a Greek freighter at the southern entrance of Bosphorus, Turkey, and exploded. She caught fire and grounded. Almost all of the tanker's crew members died. The wreck of the Independența burned for weeks, causing heavy air and sea pollution in the Istanbul area and the Sea of Marmara.
The Prestige oil spill occurred off the coast of Galicia, Spain in November 2002, caused by the sinking of the 26-year-old, structurally deficient oil tanker MV Prestige, carrying 77,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil. During a storm, it burst a tank on 13 November, and French, Spanish, and Portuguese governments refused to allow the ship to dock. The vessel subsequently sank on 19 November, about 210 kilometres (130 mi) from the coast of Galicia. It is estimated that it spilled 60,000 tonnes or a volume of 67,000 m3 (17.8 million US gal) of heavy fuel oil.
Salem was a supertanker which was scuttled off the coast of Guinea on 17 January 1980, after secretly unloading 192,000 tons of oil in Durban, South Africa. The oil was delivered in breach of the South African oil embargo, and the ship was scuttled to fraudulently claim insurance.
MV Shelly was a 1,599 GT cargo ship that was built in Bulgaria in 1973. She sank off the Mediterranean coast of Israel in 2007 after the 10,392 GT cruise ship CS Salamis Glory rammed her and broke her in two. Two of Shelly's crew were killed.
Stephenson Clarke Shipping Limited, established in 1730 is Great Britain's oldest shipping company. The company specializes in short sea bulk cargo such as aggregates, alumina, grain, coal, fertilizers and steel.
German submarine U-81 was a Type VIIC U-boat of the navy (Kriegsmarine) of Nazi Germany during World War II, famous for sinking the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal.
The Sea Empress oil spill occurred at the entrance to the Milford Haven Waterway in Pembrokeshire, Wales on 16 February 1996. The Sea Empress was en route to the Texaco oil refinery near Pembroke when she became grounded on mid-channel rocks at St. Ann's Head. Over the course of a week, she spilt 72,000 tons of crude oil into the sea. The spill occurred within the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park – one of Europe's most important and sensitive wildlife and marine conservation areas. It was Britain's third largest oil spillage and the twelfth largest in the world at the time.
The Amoco Cadiz oil spill took place on 16 March 1978, when the oil tanker Amoco Cadiz, owned by the American petroleum company Amoco, ran aground on Portsall Rocks, 2 km (1.2 mi) from the coast of Brittany, France. The vessel ultimately split in three and sank. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that the total oil spill amounted to 220,880 tonnes of oil which amounts to over 58 million gallons or 256.2 million litres, making it the largest oil spill of its kind at the time.
The Torrey Canyon oil spill was one of the world's most serious oil spills. The supertanker SS Torrey Canyon ran aground on rocks off the south-west coast of the United Kingdom in 1967, spilling an estimated 25–36 million gallons of crude oil. Attempts to mitigate the damage included the bombing of the wreck by aircraft from the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. Hundreds of miles of coastline in Britain, France, Guernsey, and Spain were affected by the oil and other substances used to mitigate damage. It was the world's worst oil spill and led to significant changes in maritime law and oil spill responses.
SM UB-49 was a German Type UB III submarine or U-boat in the German Imperial Navy during World War I. She was commissioned into the German Imperial Navy on 28 June 1917 as SM UB-49.
MV Baltic Ace was a Bahamian-flagged car carrier, that sank in the North Sea on 5 December 2012 after a collision with the Cyprus-registered container ship Corvus J. Built by Stocznia Gdynia in Poland, the ship had been in service since 2007.
MV Jupiter was a Greek-registered cruise ship that sank on 21 October 1988, within 40 minutes of leaving the Greek port of Piraeus. On board were 391 British schoolchildren and 84 adults on a study cruise and 110 crew. The disaster claimed the lives of one pupil, one teacher and two Greek crew members.
MVABT Summer was an oil tanker which was built at the South Korean shipbuilding yard of Ulsan and launched in 1974. The vessel was 344 meters in length and almost 54 meters in breadth. While under a Liberian flag, fully laden with Iranian crude and en route to Rotterdam, she sank 700 nautical miles off the Angolan coast. An unexplained explosion occurred on May 28, 1991, and the ship and its cargo began to burn. Five of the crew of thirty-two were killed in the incident, four of whom were initially reported as missing. The following day, a slick 32 kilometres (20 mi) long and 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) wide began to form. The ship continued to burn for three days before sinking on June 1. The vessel's 260,000 tonne cargo of oil was lost, leaving a visible slick on the ocean surface of approximately eighty square miles. Attempts to locate the wreck following the incident proved unsuccessful.
Loucas Haji-Ioannou was a Greek-Cypriot shipping entrepreneur. He was one of the handful of Greek ship owners whose fleets dominated the global shipping industry for most of the 20th century. He was the father of the founder of the EasyJet airline, Stelios Haji-Ioannou. He was married to Nedi and at one time lived in Psychiko, Athens.
Cyprus 
