Turkish businessman Ali Sambanci and his wife Vuslat Dogan Sambanci, scions of two of the wealthiest Turkish families, were seriously injured in a speedboat accident in Greece and were rushed to Turkey.

Ali Shambansi is president of Esas, which holds a controlling stake in low-cost airline Pegasus Airlines, as well as investments in several major Turkish startups, including delivery service Getir and marketing platform Insider. The group also has a huge real estate portfolio spanning across Turkey.

Sabancı is a third-generation member of the Sabancı empire, which founded the Turkish conglomerate Sabancı Holding in the mid-1920s. He stopped working as an executive manager at the group in 2004, joining Esas, which was founded by his father Şevket Sabancı to manage his family’s wealth.

One of Turkey’s largest conglomerates, Sabancı Holding began as a cotton and textile trading business, but now spans many sectors of Turkey’s $900 billion economy.

Ali Shambansi, born in 1969studied economics and politics in Massachusetts and holds a master’s degree in International Finance from Columbia University in New York.

Returning from the USA in 1997, where he worked cfor 2 years at the banking giant Morgan Stanley, he started working for the bank Akbank, which his family founded. In the same year, he became the head of the new projects department at the real estate company Sabancı Holding, and in June 2001 he was appointed Head of the Strategy and Business Development Group.

Ali Shambansi is best known for chairing Pegasus from 2005 to March 2023. The airline took advantage of a government decision in 2003 to liberalize domestic air travel and end a near-monopoly held by flag carrier Turkish Airlines. Shambansi is still a director at Pegasus, while Esas owns 57% of the group, which carried 27 million passengers last year, according to regulatory filings.

Vuzlat Dogan Sambanci is a director in another well-known Turkish business group, Doğan Holding, founded by her father Aydin Doğan Doğan. For a time he also ran Hürriyet, a high-profile secular newspaper.