Q&A with Adamantios Tomazos, Senior Executive Board Member
Senior Executive Board Member Adamantios Tomazos shares his over-20-year journey with Libra Group, his interests, and advice for young professionals.
[June 18, 2025]
Tell us about your journey that led you to your current role at Libra Group.
Early in my career, I was a banker in the shipping sector based in London. One of our banking relationships was with Lomar Shipping, which was owned by the Logothetis family. I met George Logothetis, who at the time was Lomar’s CEO, and realized we had a lot in common – we were both Greeks living in London and our families were from the same Greek island, Chios, which has a large shipping heritage. We even realized that we had mutual friends and my mother would play cards with George’s grandmother!
I was in New York in 2003, and met up with George who told me about his plans to form Libra Group and expand the business beyond shipping. There, we decided that I would join Libra Group and help build out these other businesses, specifically in aviation and hospitality initially.
We felt like a “one man band” in the early days – it was all hands on deck and I became a jack of all trades, quickly learning about the other sectors we were venturing into. Over time, our subsidiaries became more established and I became a Board Member for Libra Group, helping oversee our investment management activities and diversification.
What sparked your interest in aviation and shipping?
I grew up in a shipping family. From a young age, I would hear my family talk about shipping and the crisis in the 1980s where there was a massive global downturn. I would read publications like The Economist when I was just a teenager and would save article clippings. As a kid, I remember looking at a little pot of brown sugar on our kitchen table and my dad telling me that the sugar is transported by ships! That’s when things started to click for me as I understood the movement of goods. I furthered this interest in shipping while at Imperial College – I wrote a dissertation on the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.
I was equally fascinated by aviation growing up. My father would take my family to the Farnborough Air Show where I would see all kinds of commercial and fighter jets. That was really the beginning of my love affair with aviation—I even started to collect miniature airplanes and follow the aviation cycles.
How has your international background and exposure shaped your worldview and your business instincts?
I grew up in the UK but would go to Greece every summer and was fortunate to travel around Europe and even the U.S. a fair amount as a teenager. I was able to understand different cultures from these travels as well as from my immigrant heritage, which became essential in my career later on when I was regularly interacting with partners from Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America.
Throughout my career, I’ve been able to look beyond the numbers and figures and ask, “Does this make sense”? I don’t always get everything right, but I get more right than wrong. Being exposed to different cultures helped me understand some of the more qualitative factors that go into deal making.
What advice would you give to young people who are beginning their careers?
I’ve always been a self-starter, even in the early days when I was working for a bank. I created a database that would monitor every sale and purchase in the shipping sector to get a feel for the cycles. That allowed me to “talk shop” at informal client events where I could easily recall sale and purchase data.
So for young professionals, I would say find ways to add value to your knowledge base proactively – not everything will be spelled out. Seeking out knowledge on your own gives you a greater understanding and ability to ask the right questions.
I also learned the importance of building a network of mentors who can help you learn things outside of the job. For example, when I was working for the bank, I would often interact with lawyers. At first, I didn’t understand their verbiage, but then I was lucky enough to have some of those lawyers spend time with me and teach me all of the legal jargon and pitfalls. This made me better at my job and made me more alert.
Lastly, I would say to utilize your peers and colleagues for a “sanity check” before you send anything to your bosses. Lean on your teammates because they’ll likely catch mistakes that you might miss!
What keeps you busy outside of work?
I’m an amateur armchair historian – I read a ton of non-fiction and have about 2,000 books at home. I also push myself to learn new things, so lately, I’ve been reading about AI, and closely follow developments about cosmology, space travel, and astronomy.
I’ll always consider travel a passion of mine, even though I did it much more for leisure when I was younger. These days, I travel mostly for work. Since I was 20 years old, I’ve kept all my boarding passes and placed them in scrapbooks.
I also enjoy movies (especially a good science fiction film) and spend time with my friends in Miami, which is where I now reside.
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