We’ve all been there. We’re walking down a jet bridge on to a British Airways flight, only to find that the plane is not a BA jet. The fuselage is white – not red, white and blue. The only nod to the UK’s flag carrier is a BA sticker on the tailfin. We usually curse our luck, but we should be thanking Gediminas Žiemelis. If it were not for him, we would probably not be going anywhere at all.
‘We’re not an airline. We’re not selling tickets. But we will help to get you where you want to go,’ he says when we meet for lunch in the champagne bar at the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone. After ordering a seared-tuna salad Niçoise, while I opt for a salmon poke bowl, Žiemelis explains that he supplies unliveried jets to airlines all over the world, including BA, when they don’t have enough of their own to meet demand surges.
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The firm he founded, Avia SG, has a fleet of 214 aircraft and employs 12,000 people in 68 countries worldwide. Last year it posted revenue of €2.5 billion and a €68.2 million profit. It is these numbers that have helped to make Žiemelis, the richest man in Lithuania, worth an estimated €2.5 billion. He owns 60 per cent of Dublin-based Avia, with most of the rest in the hands of investment funds and management.
The 47-year-old is not pausing to enjoy his success. With McKinsey studies showing the market for short-term jet leasing is growing fast, Žiemelis figures he can increase the size of his fleet sevenfold to 1,500 aircraft over the next decade or so. ‘The potential is huge,’ he says, opening his laptop to show me the data. He is negotiating a large order for new aircraft but won’t say how many, or whether they will be Boeing or Airbus jets. He operates both.
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Žiemelis’s business works for two reasons. First, while air travel is seasonal, the precise levels of demand are hard to predict. That leaves even giants such as BA and Turkish Airlines short of aircraft during certain periods. Žiemelis only operates single-aisle jets, which fly routes no longer than four hours, because demand fluctuates on short-haul routes more than long-haul.
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Asia offers a huge market, with travel spiking at the start and end of school holidays, the dates of which – conveniently for Žiemelis – vary from country to country across the region. Hajj travel is another booming sector, with Saudi Arabia’s flag carrier Saudia alone needing an additional 100 jets to fly pilgrims to and from Mecca at certain times of the year.
The other factor driving Avia’s growth is delays in aircraft deliveries from the world’s two main manufacturers due to supply chain snarl-ups, regulatory issues and strike action. Airbus’s world-leading short-haul A320 and A321 jets are sold out until 2030 and the order books for its long-haul A330 and A350 are full for the next three to four years. Boeing, which had hoped to take up the slack, is being hampered by scrutiny by the US Federal Aviation Administration. After two crashes of the Boeing 737 Max 8 in which a total of 346 people died, and a lucky escape in January this year when a door plug blew out of a 737 Max 9 in flight, the FAA is stepping up safety checks and limiting the number of jets Boeing can produce.
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‘We have extra business,’ Žiemelis says, diplomatically. He won’t be drawn on how long it will take Boeing to recover. Avia operates 14 Boeing 737 Max 8s.
Žiemelis is wearing a blue blazer, with white shirt and a white pocket square. He speaks slowly, chewing his vowels. His school and university teachers must have drummed into him ‘show not tell’, because he constantly refers to his laptop to show me figures that illustrate whatever point he is making. It means I’ve finished my salmon poke bowl before he’s even made a dent in his salad.
He lives in Dubai but spends more than half the year flying around the world running his business, sometimes using his firm’s Boeing Business Jet. He has three passports – Lithuanian, Turkish and Slovakian – and not just for ease of travel: some countries will not issue a licence for an aviation business if it is not run by a national. He also has a 10-year golden visa to live in Dubai and has to spend 183 nights a year in the UAE to qualify for the country’s tax breaks.
It is a world away from his upbringing. When Soviet forces invaded Lithuania in 1948, his maternal grandmother was deported to Siberia on a cattle train along with 30,000 other Lithuanians. Her brother managed to escape and ended up in Chicago. The young Žiemelis remembers the parcels his great-uncle would send which somehow made it to the family’s home unscathed. ‘There was always coffee, chewing gum, clothes for all the family, especially a winter jacket.’
His mother returned to Lithuania in 1956, aged nine. She found that what had once been the family home was now a school. Worse, she could not get anything more than a menial job under the Soviet system because deportees were denied membership of the communist party and the job perks that came with it. Nonetheless, things looked up after she left university and married a man who rose through the ranks to become a prosecutor.
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Žiemelis took his own chance to escape the shackles of communism after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 and Lithuania secured its independence. But it did not start well. ‘I worked for nine months in the Lithuania Savings Bank, which had been privatised, but they fired me.’ Why? ‘Because I was useless. I was working in the compliance department in credit card fraud but I was lousy.’
With three colleagues who were also sacked, he established a ratings agency for Lithuanian companies that also served as a credit management and verification system. He sold it in 2005 for €2 million. Having got the entrepreneurial bug, he went on to set up more than a dozen businesses across a number of sectors. He has taken five of his firms public, raising more than $1 billion.
Žiemelis chose to make Dubai his home, with his wife and their three daughters, partly because its geography is ideal for his business. On Emirates airline it is ‘an hour or two around the Gulf, seven hours to Europe, 16 hours to Sydney, 14 hours to New York, and 14 hours to São Paulo’, he points out. He adds that it offers good schools and ‘great weather for nine months of the year’ and is safe and politically neutral.
The emirate has been criticised lately for accepting too much money from questionable sources. These include Russian oligarchs sanctioned after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the Gupta family, who fled to the UAE amid a vast corruption scandal in South Africa that brought down South African president Jacob Zuma in 2018. The UAE has not imposed sanctions on Russia.
‘I’m satisfied with the jurisdiction there,’ Žiemelis says. ‘The banks now have very strict KYC [know your client] requirements. The authorities are clamping down on payments between Dubai companies run by Russian passport-holders and China. There are red lines that you cannot cross.’
He only spends a few weeks a year in London these days and tries to make his visits quick. That’s one reason he likes to stay at the Landmark, an old railway terminus on the A40 which is far less grand than a Mayfair hotel but, he points out, handier for Heathrow, Northolt or Farnborough airports.
Many Britons are leaving the UK for Dubai, as Sir Keir Starmer warns that taxes will rise, especially for the wealthy. Is Britain making a mistake by raising taxes, I ask. ‘I can talk as a businessman who has lived in 10 countries at different times. What is a country in the modern world? It’s a global supermarket which needs to attract buyers, commerce, people and in return offer them security, utilities, heath, infrastructure. I’m a client of Dubai.’ Sounds like a yes.
As he finally begins to tackle his salad and San Pellegrino, I turn to the future of Russia. Avia lost 13 aircraft, worth $570 million, that were leased to Aeroflot when Moscow ordered the invasion of Ukraine. The fate of Russia and Ukraine largely depends on who wins the US presidential election in November, he argues: if it’s Donald Trump, there could be peace ‘as early as the first quarter of next year’. That soon? ‘Yes. Trump is a dealmaker. At the end of the day, there has to be a compromise between the two sides, driven by logic and value. I think Trump is driven by logic more than other politicians because he’s from business. He will make it possible for the two sides to say, “I will give you that, and you will give me that”.’
The double espressos have arrived, which gives me time to ask about basketball. Žiemelis played from the age of seven until 14, when his short stature meant he lacked ‘the physical parameters’, he jokes. He owns a Lithuanian basketball team, the Wolves, and has plans to create a global network. He opens his laptop one last time to show me his pitch. TV deals give the NBA a basic income of $6.9 billion per year, but basketball outside the US earns a meagre $42 million. He calculates the media rights for basketball outside the US will be worth at least $1.2 billion per year. He wants to buy out existing teams or create new ones ‘in cities not occupied by a strong team – London, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Dubai. I want to make a footprint in every big market and create a new network. There will be a revolution.’
If the success of most of his ventures is anything to go by, his hoop dreams might just come true.
