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"Flags of Convenience." Niarchos is able to haul oil cheaper than U.S. producers can in their own tankers and pile up fabulous profits because, like most independents, he whittles operating costs to the bone, runs all but a few of his ships under "flags of convenience." Registered by mail order in Panama or Liberia, the ships pay only nominal taxes,* e.g., 10¢ a ton yearly, employ nonunion crews and are unlikely ever to be seized for defense reasons. Niarchos, in addition, pays no corporate taxes on most of his profits. These are considerations which no banker can afford to overlook. As an approving London banker said recently: "The great virtue of Niarchos is that he's a gypsy."
For these and other reasons, Niarchos is distrusted by oldtime shipowners, sneered at as an "uptown boy," i.e., a landlubber who doesn't know his fantail from a fo'c'sle. Though he seldom sets foot aboard a tanker, Niarchos retorts angrily that he is far more concerned with his fleet than his fortune.
Lowest of the Low. Niarchos has a rare faculty for expanding his fleet "when shipyards are hungry." In 1949, when British yards were hungry ($120 a ton), he ordered ten tankers; when British berths filled up, Niarchos fed the German, Dutch and Swedish yards, later moved on to hungry Japan. He drives a hard bargain. Says Netherlands Dock and Shipbuilding Co.'s Pieter Goedkoop, who has built two tankers for Niarchos: "He dictated the price. It wasn't unreasonably low. It was the lowest of the low that he could reasonably ask." But after signing a construction contract, Niarchos believes in letting the shipbuilder do the job without niggling interference. Though the World Glory was the world's biggest tanker when it was launched in 1954, Niarchos gave Bethlehem Shipbuilding a scant four pages of specifications instead of the usual 4-lb. tome; he sent no inspectors aboard until just before the tanker was launched.
While prewar Greek ships were sorrylooking rustbuckets, Niarchos has turned out some of the handsomest merchantmen afloat. To get top seamen, Niarchos pays his Italian, Greek, German and British crews more than they would earn under their own national flags (but less than one-third of the U.S. scale), equips his new tankers with air conditioning, lavish private quarters for all hands, tiled showers, TV, elevators, recreation rooms.
The New Plutocrat. Footloose and taxfree, Niarchos typifies a new species of plutocrat. He leads a frankly sybaritic life, with no apologies and few hangovers.