Yianis Group

Yianis Group is a London-based property development and investment company, wholly owned by the Cyprus-born British billionaire, John Christodoulou.

After a seven-year legal battle it initiated against the building's owner, North West Ground Rents Limited, part of the publicly quoted Ground Rents Income Fund, over who should be made to pay £8.9m to fund essential remedial works of the external facade, which Yianis Group subsidiary Blue Manchester Limited eventually won at the High Court in 2019, Yianis Group acquired the freehold for a 'nominal' sum.

[7] The group of companies has been embroiled in the so-called leasehold scandal, having been stripped of control of Canary Riverside in 2016 due to poor financial transparency and block management.

It had been heard that the surreptitiously inflated insurance premiums had been for commissions and fees to a freeholder linked company, Westminster Management Services.

The tribunal praised the leaseholders' persistence and concluded that had they not bought the action, the information revealing the true scale of secret commissions reaped from the development would not have been obtained.