Remembering Andy Hadjicostis

I first met Andy Hadjicostis in 1994, when he was working as an intern in the Düsseldorf office of Kienbaum und Partner GmbH, the German management consultancy where I started my consultancy career. He returned to Cyprus in that year to take a post in his father’s DIAS media group, which includes Sigma television and the Simerini newspaper.

Andy and I remained in contact, and in 1995-96, when I set up Navigator Consulting Group in Athens, we explored the possibility of a cooperation with a consultancy he had established in Nicosia.

The cooperation was not fated to continue. The commercial methods used by the Cypriot group were “hypercompetitive,” to say the least. On two occasions, I discovered attempts to circumvent the terms of our agreement to gain an unfair advantage. By 1997, I decided that the ethical foundation to business that I assumed were a common value could not be taken for granted, and decided to terminate business relations.

Since then, I would run into Andy about once per year in Cyprus, usually at the Hilton or Hilton Park hotels. We would exchange the typical greetings, and I’d usually be invited to come and discuss business, but I would decline.

So who was Andy Hadjicostis? Like many Cypriots, he was extraordinarily ambitious, to the point of blurring the line between what was real and what was imagined. I remember asking about his consultancy recently, and being told it was “going global”—a major hyperbole for a small company dedicated largely to organising conferences in Nicosia.

Andy was social. He lived for social interaction, for conversation, for ideas. His was not the deep mind of careful analysis, but of the cut-and-thrust of debate, of “great ideas.” In this, he was perhaps the archetypical Greek media player: quick to speak, perhaps slower to consider the consequences of what was said.

He was a man who relished the trappings of power. Andy took over his father’s company after a short trial period as an executive. His older brother preferred to leave, and Andy became the Managing Director of the group.

He was not a person who worried unduly about ethical issues such as the separation between media and government. The DIAS group played a major role in supporting the “No” campaign against the Annan Plan in 2004. A number of other incidents regarding DIAS’ coverage and its political aspirations surfaced which pointed to a steady involvement, indeed interference, in the “business” of political news. In this, DIAS was no different from many other Greek or Greek-Cypriot media organisations, but I had expected better given the image Andy would project as a responsible media manager.

Yesterday, I learned in a conversation with a friend that Andy had been murdered on Monday evening, with two bullets to his back and chest, outside his home in Nicosia. Two suspects were seen driving away on a high-speed motorcycle.

Rumours swirling around Cyprus point to some murky opposition to the current negotiations between President Dimitris Christofias and the Turkish-Cypriot leader, Mehmet Ali Talat, or to the bizarre theft of the body of Tassos Papadopoulos last month. Other rumours point to a financial disagreement with a jailed convict, and a settling of scores.

Coverage in the Greek news has been intense on channels such as Star or programmes such as “Kous Kous”. Andy is described as a “media tycoon”, a friend of singer Anna Vissi and several other singers, and generally someone influential and powerful. A hagiography is in the making as “journalists” from across the media spectrum join together to anoint the industry’s newest saint.

But the Andy I remembered was a different person. He inherited his father’s “empire”, but did not create it. He left Germany after a few months of training, and rapidly immersed himself in the synthetic world of the Cypriot media, and the shallow ambition this entailed. He seemed all too ready to subordinate good sense to ambition, even when a cursory analysis would have showed the advantages of remaining with good sense.

In this, perhaps, he is no different from many other people, particularly those who inherit their position rather than create it themselves. I did not think his story would end well, but I assumed that arrogance or a family feud would be his undoing, not an assassin’s bullet.

Andy is being buried today in Nicosia, perhaps more famous in death than he ever was in life. I write this post in Athens, reflecting on the time that has passed, and the long miles travelled since those early years in Düsseldorf. Long ago I learned, perhaps the hard way, that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, and that the price we pay to realise our dreams is perhaps far higher than the benefits these dreams could ever promise.

We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Rest in Peace.

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