$1bn club: Select group of Greek shipowners have broken with tradition to establish a home on Wall Street

When Athens-based Tsakos Energy Navigation expanded its public listing from Oslo to New York in March 2002, it did not have a lot of company as a stock-listed Greek shipowner in the US.

Tsakos was not the first — for example, Stelios Hajioannou’s tanker outfit Stelmar Shipping had tapped the market a year earlier — but it could still count on one hand the number of Greek owners trading in the Big Apple.