A 40-year-old businessman shot dead in the coastal suburb of Voula on Saturday in a gangland-style ambush is believed to have owed hundreds of thousands of euros to underworld figures, police sources have said.

“No one had as many unsettled accounts as him,” an officer at the police’s anti-extortion unit said to Kathimerini of Babis Lazaridis, the owner of a string of nightclubs in Attica. He said that police are seeking to identify Lazaridis’s creditors.

A bomb attack in March on a nightclub co-owned by Lazaridis on central Syngrou Avenue, which caused damage but no injuries, is still being probed by police who believe the 40-year-old might have planned the hit himself in a bid to make an insurance claim.

Lazaridis is believed to have had links with the convicted leader of an Athens extortion ring currently in jail in central Greece.