Sir easygoing

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Stelios is an unassuming man. Anyone who met him as I did would be hard pressed not to take away the same impression. At the stroke of 2pm, as agreed, he had ambled anonymously into the lobby of the Grovesnor hotel in Dubai, to meet me for lunch.

Dressed unostentatiously, he was not the larger than life character I was expecting, the celebrity businessman legend in Britain depicts him as. But he is charming and engaging, nonetheless, as keen to learn about Dubai as I was to learn about him.

In fact, he would not allow me to begin the interview until I had answered his questions regarding the prospects for Dubai's real estate story, or the region's vulnerability to the global credit crunch. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Stelios describes himself during our conversation as a "professional foreigner." By that, he means he is practised at doing, so the phrase goes, as the Romans do.

So, what was being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain like? Now he is laughing again.

"I don't even put it on my card. It is not something I talk a lot about. I didn't ask for it. Literally, a letter arrived in the post. The guy that opens the post called me and said: I think this is serious. You turn up at Buckingham Palace, and you're there with 200 other people. There is a bit of a feeling of "next" about it all. You get your thirty seconds with Her Majesty, and that is about it. You accept it graciously. It is on my passport and credit card."

Does it help you get upgrades when you are flying? For a moment his eyes widen, before he realises the joke. That big smile again.

"What I have found is that it works well in Anglo-Saxon countries. It is actually laughed at in Continental European countries and socialist countries. If you go around Greece calling yourself Sir Stelios, people are going to laugh. So you have to pick and choose when to use it. Remember, I was born in a country (Cyprus) that is completely socialist; we don't believe in titles."

Why did he float easyJet, and effectively give up running it (Stelios and his siblings still retain a 37 percent stake in the airline)? And does he regret doing so?

"In 2000, we floated on the London Stock Exchange. We did it because it was essential to raise more capital to buy more aircraft. I took the view that I'd rather own a smaller piece of a bigger thing, rather than the other way around. And that is what happened. The main issue is that I decided to design something that would serve as many people as possible. In the last twelve months, easyJet has carried between 43 million and 44 million people. So it makes a difference in a lot of peoples' lives. Just before I floated the company on the stock market, I said to myself: I am not really the corporate type. I can't work for a PLC. The average term of a Chief Executive of a PLC in London is only 4.5 years. I was 33 then. I would have been redundant at 37 and a half. So I thought I had better design a different model."

At this point, Stelios leans across the table to hand me one of his business cards. On the reverse is printed a list of words beginning with the word ‘easy.' easyInternetcafe, easyCar, easyCinema, and others. easy4men leaps out from the list.

"So I separated the ownership from the name of the company. I own the name easyGroup. And I started creating separate companies, some of them better than others, I won't lie to you."

He now wants to talk about low cost hotel chain easyHotel (soon to open in Jebel Ali), which is why he is in Dubai, but I can't resist. What's easy4men?.

"It's a travel pack for shaving foam. After they introduced the 100ml rule for liquids on planes, we introduced this."

It sounds more exciting than that.

"No, it's boring," he says.

But isn't it hard registering the domain names and trademarks? Don't people realise they can make a fast buck by beating him to it? A short time spent on the Internet reveals that Stelios had some trouble claiming the name easyPizza from a man with a pizza delivery company in the UK.

He nods vigorously. "I have been spending a fortune on lawyers. easyPizza is a business we run in the UK, it's a franchise. We have the name now. It's expensive. You spend money on lawyers and everything else. When I started it was difficult. Thirteen years and billions and billions of pounds worth of investment later, I think now we own the ‘easy' brand. We have about a thousand trademarks. easy this and easy that. So we have the legal rights to stop them."

So, for example, if I tried to set up easyPaintbrushes tomorrow, I'd have you on my back?

The smile fades momentarily, and he eyes me with something approaching suspicion. "I would stop you," he says certainly. And I believe him.

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