Chief A G Leventis

Anniversary Coin

The Early Years
Anastasios G Leventis was born in December 1902 in the Cypriot mountain village of Lemythou. The earliest records of his family dates back to the 18th century when a young ancestor traveled to the Peloponnese to join in the abortive 1770 uprising against Ottoman rule.

At the end of the First World War the young Anastasios, determined to improve his education and prospects, traveled to visit his elder brother, George, who was already in Egypt and from there took ship to Marseilles, where he first found work and then completed his commercial education at the Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Bordeaux. Through a Marseilles contact he found employment with an Anglo-Greek Manchester-based company in a rural part of south-eastern Nigeria in 1920 and, two years later, with a British company, also based in Manchester, as the manager of their branch in Abeokuta in the south-west of Nigeria.

Rise of an Entrepreneur
Anastasios Leventis was, above all, a dynamic and inspired man of business; his employers, G.B. Ollivants, recognized this at an early stage; by 1928 he was Deputy General Manager in Nigeria and, in 1929, at the age of 26, he was transferred to Accra, capital of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), to take over as General Manager of the company's business in that country and in Ivory Coast and Togo. The Gold Coast was the most advanced of the British colonies in West Africa and already had an embryonic system of local self-administration, with a Legislative Council at its apex. Anastasios Leventis was chosen by the commercial community as a member of the Legislative Council to represent its interests. He also served as Chairman of the Accra Chamber of Commerce.

The building of an Empire
In the 1930's Anastasios Leventis left to form his own company, A.G. Leventis & Company Limited, joined by George Keralakis and, a little later, by Christodoulos Leventis, Anastasios' younger brother.

The new company, although established at the height of the depression, made rapid progress and soon had branches in all parts of the Gold Coast; in 1942 Christodoulos moved to Nigeria to set up branches of the company there. A.G. Leventis and Company Limited was soon to rival the large, long-established trading companies that stood at the heart of the colonial West African economy.

By the time of his death in October 1978, it was one of the largest enterprises and one of the two largest employers in Nigeria and was on the point of expanding into other parts of the world.