On the evening of 5 July 2011, the laden tanker Brillante Virtuoso (BV), beneficially owned by a Greek shipowner called Marios Iliopoulos, was drifting about 10 miles off Aden. The tanker was in the notorious High Risk Area (HRA), so-called because it was the area where Somali pirates, then near the height of their successes, were known to operate. (Somalia is just across the water from Aden, about half a day’s steaming away). The ship was stationary because she was awaiting a security team of three men from Athens who were to accompany her through the HRA. They had been delayed because their original flight via Cairo had been cancelled and now, having been booked on a fresh flight, they were due to embark the following morning.
Just before midnight, the ship was approached by a small, unlit boat containing seven armed men. They claimed to be the “authorities”, and asked to board. The master, Noe Gonzaga, who like the rest of the crew was Filipino, was deceived into letting them do so, and they climbed up the pilot’s ladder which he had ordered to be let down. Once on the ship, however, the men herded the crew into a TV room. Two of them took Gonzaga to the bridge at gunpoint and ordered him peremptorily to sail to Somalia, an order that would subsequently be heard on the vessel’s voyage data recorder (VDR). The chief engineer, Nestor Tabares, was taken to the engine room by another pair of intruders, also at gunpoint, and ordered to start the main engine. With impressive presence of mind, and in spite of being terrified by the guns which the intruders were recklessly firing, the master sailed the vessel westwards in the direction of Djibouti, rather than towards Somalia; in the darkness, the pirates fortunately did not notice.
After an hour of steaming, the main engine broke down and would not restart, despite Tabares’ efforts. He then managed to give the slip to the pirates who were guarding him. Seemingly frustrated by the breakdown and the chief engineer’s escape, the pirates threw a hand-grenade into the place where they thought he was hiding, to flush him out. The grenade ignited a fire in the engine room. Having raided the ship’s safe, the pirates left. The fire spread out of control. The crew raised the alarm and abandoned the vessel in a panic, without any attempt at firefighting. They were rescued by a US warship patrolling in the area. The local salvors, a Greek company called Poseidon, who had attended the casualty with admirable speed, nonetheless could not put out the fire. The BV’s engine room, equipment and accommodation – all its most valuable parts – were burned out.
The ship was a constructive total loss (a write-off), even though she was still floating and her fuel oil cargo was undamaged. (The cargo was later transferred to another vessel off Sharjah.) The shipowner claimed against his insurers – underwriters at Lloyd’s – on a war risks policy which provided cover in the event of a pirate attack. The account set out above is essentially the story he told: that the BV was one more victim of the Somali pirate scourge, and that its crew were traumatised victims of a terrible, violent experience.
Iliopoulos was no stranger to insurers. He had owned another ship, the Elli, which became a total loss following a fire and grounding, also off Aden, two years previously. Tabares had been its chief engineer. That ship too had been attended by Poseidon. Insurers had doubts about this claim, but could not prove them, and the case in due course settled out of court.
Insurers needed someone on the spot to investigate the BV casualty as soon as possible, and they chose an experienced surveyor called David Mockett, who lived in Aden (in 2011 still just safe for Westerners). He went on board the ship a few days after the fire went out, and was immediately suspicious about the attack. In particular, he could see no evidence of any grenade. He wondered whether the attack, which showed none of the conventional signs of a Somali pirate assault, was even genuine. After all, Somali pirates did not normally set fire to ships; they took them away, kept them intact and ransomed them. Mockett expressed his suspicions unguardedly (including to his wife back in England). Within a few days, he had been murdered by a bomb placed under his car. At the subsequent inquest in Plymouth, the senior investigating British police officer said that the Yemeni authorities had investigated the case thoroughly and believed that criminals, not terrorists, were responsible. “David had great integrity and would not bow to bully-boy tactics”, he said. A verdict of unlawful killing was recorded. It seems an inevitable inference that someone powerful in Yemen wanted Mockett out of the way. To this day, his widow believes that the surveyor was murdered because of his connection with the BV.
Insurers were now in a quandary. The ship had unquestionably been boarded by strangers, and set on fire. On the face of it, that was an event falling within the cover. If the suggestion were seriously to be made that it was some sort of put-up job, they would have to prove it. But they had no evidence, only surmise and suspicion. The parties agreed instead to argue first about the amount of the claim. Underwriters lost that argument; the claim was held to be for the full sum insured under the policy (US$77m – though the ship was actually worth only a small fraction of that sum (maybe US$15m), and had been losing money hand over fist). So they were back to square one, facing what one observer would call “mission impossible” if they wanted to contest their liability. True, it was odd that the vessel had been imprudently drifting in the HRA, and odder that Gonzaga had been tricked into letting the men on-board – but the shipowner supplied statements from all the important crew members, and the story they told supported his version. There were no witnesses to the contrary. There was no possibility of getting any evidence from Yemen, which meanwhile had descended into civil war. And as to why the pirates had set fire to the ship – that looked strange, but there was never going to be any evidence from them.
Two years after the casualty, insurers had a much-needed stroke of luck. They had asked for documentation about the incident under the Freedom of Information Act from the US Navy. Most of their requests were refused, but what they received contained vital new clues. First, the Navy was itself deeply suspicious about the incident. Like Mockett, it thought that the attack bore none of the hall-marks of Somali piracy. Second, the new documents contained a small but crucial detail. According to the crew’s contemporaneous accounts given to the Navy, the attackers had not tricked their way on board by saying that they were the “authorities” at all. Rather, they had said that they were the “security team” – the one that the ship was expecting. But this new evidence raised important questions: how could genuine Somali pirates have known that the ship was awaiting a security team at all? How could the crew have believed them, since the security detail was expected not at midnight, but only late the following morning? How come the crew’s story had changed; and who was behind that?
The US Navy documentation unearthed another inconsistency. It recorded the chief engineer saying not that the engine had broken down (a lucky coincidence, according to the shipowner’s story, since otherwise the ship would have ended up in Somalia), but that he had sabotaged it in order to frustrate the pirates. In other words, that the reason why the ship didn’t end up in Somalia was because the chief engineer stopped it from going there. But that explanation contradicted the version of events put forward by the shipowner.
Their suspicions growing, insurers turned to investigate the flight which the security crew had originally been booked on – the cancellation of which was the reason why the ship had had to drift overnight off Aden in the first place. The fact of the cancellation had been supported by a signed letter from the shipowner’s travel agent. Since the flight in question was a Yemen Air flight, it was difficult to track down the details, but it eventually emerged that the story was not true: the flight had not been cancelled. Indeed, it had left slightly early.
Armed with these still fragmentary clues, 3½ years after the episode, the insurers took the serious step of formally alleging that the shipowner had destroyed his own ship, and that the so-called pirates were no such thing. This development was greeted with outrage by Iliopoulos. He protested to the court that he was a respectable businessman, on friendly terms with the Archbishop of Athens; his lawyers submitted that insurers’ allegations were “cavalier and callous … self-evidently paper-thin” and so weak that they should not be allowed even to be made. But even though to this day he runs a successful ferry line in Greece (for which he won a prize at the 2018 Lloyd’s List Greek Shipping awards), Iliopoulos was embarked on the course of destroying his own claim. Required by repeated court orders to disclose his telephone records, emails and other correspondence over the relevant period, he failed to comply. The reasons he gave for not doing so became ever more convoluted and implausible. In the end the judge ordered him to come to London and be cross-examined about them. He initially refused, claiming an ear disorder, but abandoned this excuse when the judge ordered that he submit to an independent medical examination.
Iliopoulos gave oral evidence for two full days. It did not go well. First, he was arrested by the City of London police as he left court, on suspicion of maritime fraud, though he was not subsequently charged. Second, the judge, Mr Justice Flaux, found that his pretexts for not producing the documents involved a series of lies and elaborate ploys, including fabricating a tale that the documents were in the hands of a Greek lawyer (and family friend) who held them on behalf of someone else, and getting this other person to pretend to refuse to authorise their production. This proved to be only one of a number of charades designed to deceive the court and Iliopoulos’s own (innocent) solicitors. Third, the judge found that he had hacked into insurers’ solicitors’ emails, stolen confidential documents and given them to the same Greek lawyer; the documents were then used as the basis of criminal proceedings launched in Greece, which accused the insurers of illegal surveillance there. Fourth, during his cross-examination Iliopoulos told insurers’ QC that he would be “held responsible”, if insurers continued to press their allegations. The judge had had enough, and firmly told Iliopoulos to behave. In his May 2016 judgment, he wrote: “Mr Iliopoulos clearly lost his temper and effectively threatened insurers and their legal representatives from the witness box in a disgraceful manner … With this intemperate and menacing evidence, Mr Iliopoulos lost any remaining vestige of credibility”. In that ruling, the judge dismissed the shipowner’s entire claim because of his failure to disclose documents – records which Iliopoulos himself had unwisely admitted to be “crucial”.
The dismissal of Iliopoulos’s claim was not the end of the matter, because the BV had been financed by a ship mortgage, and the Greek lender, Piraeus Bank, was entitled to carry on its own independent claim on the same insurance. It did so, continuing vigorously to deny that Iliopoulos had had anything to do with the pirates. Its solicitors accused the insurers’ lawyers of having lost their sense of objectivity about the claim, and complained that they were conducting a “campaign” against the shipowner. So the key issue in the case – whether there had been a genuine pirate attack – remained the same.
The ship’s VDR, in effect its “black box”, was carefully deciphered and translated, an exercise which took months. Eventually, there was a complete recording of events on the bridge on the night in question. This record, in confirmation of the US Navy documents, made it impossible for anyone to maintain that the intruders had said that they were “authorities”. It was clear beyond doubt that they had announced themselves as “security”. Gonzaga and other witnesses had to prepare new statements accepting this. The master who, although awake, had not gone to the bridge at any stage in the emergency but had inexplicably skulked in his cabin (or, as it subsequently emerged, the lavatory), now said that it was only when he was “quite sure” that the men were the security crew that he agreed to let them on board. But how could they be the security detail, which was not due for several hours? The VDR revealed another vital fact: that the ship’s master and crew knew before the men boarded that the strangers were not only armed, but wearing face-masks. Why would a security team do that?
Insurers continued trying to garner evidence. In the second half of 2017, there were several important developments. First, Bloomberg happened to run a lengthy piece on the hijacking. It explained that one of the junior members of the crew, AB Marquez, had been contacted and interviewed for the article. “His words came pouring out. He’d been waiting a long time, he said, to tell his story. Marquez alleged that after the attack, Iliopoulos sought him out at his hotel in Aden and threatened him. The shipowner wanted him to alter or omit parts of his account of the hijacking when giving statements to investigators, Marquez said. He added that chief engineer Tabares confronted him, too, at a hotel in Manila weeks later.Marquez said that he was no longer afraid of either Iliopoulos or Tabares. “Now”, he wrote, “I’m afraid to God. How long I can hide the truth in my conscience?” Insurers sent a solicitor to interview Marquez who, incredibly, added another element to the mix. He claimed that thousands of tons of cargo had been illegally siphoned off the BV and stolen during a call at Jeddah just before the hijacking. Could this further crime possibly have been committed as well?
It had also by this time become clear that the story of the fire being started by a grenade could not be true. The parties’ explosives and fire experts agreed that the fire had been started not by a grenade, but by an improvised explosive incendiary device (IEID), i.e. by a sort of incendiary bomb the only purpose of which can have been to start a destructive fire. This common ground posed another problem for the bank: why on earth would Somali pirates bring such a device on board with them, or want to start a fire at all? To make things worse, the bank accepted that, although the pirates had brought on board the IEID, they had not brought with them any accelerant, such as petrol, which would have been necessary to set it off. So on the bank’s case, the men were committing themselves, if they were ever driven to use the IEID, to search out a suitable accelerant somewhere on board an unfamiliar vessel; otherwise it wouldn’t work. This all seemed unlikely.
Also in 2017, underwriters’ representatives established contact with not one but two potential whistle-blowers. It is extremely rare in scuttling cases to find anyone who is willing to give direct evidence of wrongdoing. If insurers are to win at trial, they normally expect to do so by piecing together a mosaic of circumstantial evidence from individual details which eventually form an irresistible picture. So the emergence of these men was potential gold-dust. Both whistle-blowers told a similar basic story. The attack by pirates was indeed no such thing. The men in question were actually renegade members of the Yemeni Coast Guard. They had been hired by Iliopoulos and Vassilios Vergos, who was none other than the owner of the local salvage company, Poseidon, which had responded with such commendable swiftness on the morning of 6 July 2011 but failed to extinguish the fire on the BV. Vergos had powerful friends in Yemen, who had procured a boat, men, arms and explosives. The two whistle-blowers, who had not seen each other since 2012, now named the same names. Iliopoulos’s motive for entering such a conspiracy was to rid himself of an elderly, loss-making ship and pay off his ever-growing bank debts with the insurance proceeds. Vergos’s motivation was to share in a salvage award (which could be expected to be very large, given the value of the cargo on board). Their aims were thus completely aligned.
Although they told the same essential story (including that Vergos had subsequently threatened Theodorou that he would be killed if he reported what had happened), the two informers were very different in other respects. Vassilis Theodorou claimed to have been part of Vergos’s salvage team and to have attended the BV while it was still on fire. Sensationally, he said that the original fire started by the pirates had not succeeded in burning out the valuable parts of the ship; indeed, the chief engineer had exclaimed to him, “Shit, fire gone out”. So, on the morning of 6 July, members of the salvage team including Theodorou had gone into the engine room, smashed pipes and fittings to release more oil and reignited the fire. This would have been a dangerous and foolhardy thing to do, but Theodorou was adamant. However, he was only willing to give underwriters a statement verifying this evidence in exchange for a large sum of money, and they refused to deal with him on these terms. But what he did give them, as an inducement to pay him, was a series of photos of the progress of the fire that day. These indeed showed that the fire had pretty much gone out in the morning, only to be vigorously burning again by the same afternoon. How could that have happened, except by human intervention? Where could the oil fuelling the afternoon fire have come from?
Insurers’ fire expert Dr Alan Craggs pored over these photographs. Taken together with Theodorou’s claims, they seemed indeed to show that the fire had, however recklessly, been deliberately reignited. But how? Studying them alongside old photographs of the interior of the ship from the original surveys straight after the casualty, which he had had for years and looked at time and again, Craggs had a eureka moment. There was a diesel oil tank within a part of the engine room called the purifier room, which had a drain cock or tap on it. He was familiar with the photos taken in August 2011 which showed the tap looking as one would expect, attached to the tank and apparently in working order. But now he noticed for the first time a photo from earlier – from July – which showed something quite different. It was the same tap, but it had been smashed off, leaving a hole in the diesel oil tank. How had it come to be smashed off? Even more significantly, why had anyone subsequently bothered to reattach the tap, on what was by now a dead ship? The pieces were beginning to fall into place: here at last was a “smoking gun”, albeit in the unglamorous form of an engine room fitting. Insurers were able to widen their allegations of conspiracy, now claiming that the salvors were complicit in the attack, and that far from fighting the fire, they had reignited it. The fuel with which they had done so came from the diesel oil tank, the tap on which had been smashed off, an action deliberately concealed by its subsequent reattachment.
The second-whistle-blower, Dimitris Plakakis, was a very different kettle of fish from Theodorou. He too had been in Aden at the time of the attack, and was living alongside Vergos on a floating crane. However, he only witnessed the conspiracy; he was not part of it. Importantly, he was not seeking a huge pay-out in return for cooperation with insurers. Indeed, he had volunteered a lengthy statement to the City of London police, giving details of the plot between Iliopoulos and Vergos, and explaining how they envisaged that the method of destruction of the BV would have to be different and unconventional, given the recent total loss of the Elli. What Plakakis primarily sought was safety. His worry was that, living in Greece, he was in personal danger from Iliopoulos, and this concern was shared by the police. He described a sinister incident in which someone claiming to be ringing on behalf of Iliopoulos had telephoned him late at night. The following day, unidentified cars had hung around outside his isolated rural home. Plakakis now pressed the panic button; he was bundled hurriedly out of Greece and into protective police custody in England. (He remained in an anonymous location, and gave evidence remotely from a police station at the trial.)
That trial eventually began in February 2019, and ran for 52 days, until July. The bank’s case underwent a slow-motion but inexorable collapse. Iliopoulos, on the advice of his criminal lawyer, did not give evidence. (Nor did Vergos – an absence which the judge thought suspicious). The master and chief engineer gave evidence by video-link from the Philippines, allegedly because they feared being arrested if they came to London. They were not a success. Gonzaga flipped back to saying that he thought the men in the boat were the “authorities”, despite the evidence of the VDR. He also said that when they first approached the BV (in the middle of the night, it will be remembered, and 10 miles offshore), he thought that they were men selling fish, or had come to borrow whisky, cigarettes or a pen. Asked why he thought they were wearing masks, he said that it may have been to avoid contagious diseases, or dust, or bad smells. It was hard to take this evidence seriously, and the judge in due course rejected it. He also rejected the chief engineer’s claim that the main engine had broken down, and he found that Tabares had in fact deliberately stopped it. It also emerged from the oral evidence that on the evening in question the master had taken the crew’s passports out of the safe, and that he and the chief engineer had bags of clothes ready packed – as if they were expecting to leave the ship that night. The judge weighed each element in the story, but came to the conclusion that the master and the chief engineer were lying when they claimed to have been terrified at gunpoint by pirates. In truth they were part of the conspiracy to stage a fake pirate attack. It was the Gonzaga’s job to let the men on board. It was Tabares’ job to stop the engine and then claim that it had (luckily for the crew) broken down.
The bank by this time had been driven to admit that the pirates could not have been Somalis (not least because the VDR did not record them speaking Somali), and were indeed Yemeni Coast Guard men, as the whistle-blowers had already said. It now suggested that they had been engaged on an admittedly unprecedented (and never repeated) piece of private enterprise, ventured in order to supplement their irregular government salaries. One among many problems with this explanation was that the bank was stuck with the recording on the VDR of the order which the intruders had given to the master, to go to Somalia. Why would Yemeni officials want to take a ship across the Gulf of Aden into the lion’s den of Somali pirates, who were notorious for their violence and lawlessness? The bank summoned an academic from King’s College London, an undoubted piracy expert called Dr Anya Shortland, to construct a speculative theory of some sort of self-enforcing, one-off deal between the two groups to share the proceeds of ransom. The judge dismissed her evidence as “inconsistent” and “muddled”.
The bank’s fire expert Dr Alan Mitcheson, who started by disputing that the fire had ever gone out on the morning of 6 July and then been reignited, had to agree in cross-examination that there were indeed probably two separate fires. He also belatedly admitted that the diesel oil tap had been knocked off deliberately. (The bank had run a comical and freakish case that the tap had been displaced by a piece of flying machinery during the first hours of the fire, but this theory was ignominiously abandoned on day 35 of the trial.) And finally Mitcheson admitted that diesel oil must have been released, after the first fire and before the second, by someone going into the purifier room and releasing it.
On top of all this, it became clear that the shipowner was in severe financial difficulties at the time of the incident. So Iliopoulos had a clear motive for trying to manufacture a fraudulent claim. The writing was by now (if not earlier) on the wall, but even so the bank did not give up on maintaining its client’s innocence. The case ran its full course, including eight days of closing speeches.
After considering the case over the summer, Mr Justice Teare handed down his detailed judgment on 7 October 2019, saying that he was in no doubt that the destruction of the BV had been caused not by pirates, but by Iliopoulos in conspiracy with Vergos, the master and chief engineer. The fire was indeed reignited on the morning of 6 July 2011. The story that the ship was awaiting the security crew was a “ruse”. The letter from the travel agent about the cancelled flight was concocted. Iliopoulos’s character, shown up by the charades with which he had unsuccessfully tried to deceive Mr Justice Flaux three years previously, supported the overwhelming evidence that he was the instigator and orchestrator of the conspiracy. The judge reached this conclusion without relying on the whistle-blower evidence, although he noted that the thrust of Theodorou’s account was essentially true. And for good measure, he found that the ship’s crew had indeed stolen cargo at Jeddah as well. What this meant was that, far-fetched as insurers’ case theory had seemed to be (the bank had stigmatised it as “baroque”), the notion that the events of the night of 5/6 July 2011 can have had an innocent explanation was much more so.
At the heart of his judgment, the judge examined all the things that would have had to be true for the attack on the BV to have been the innocent fortuity which Iliopoulos and the bank claimed that it was. He called this “the alternative scenario”.
“The alternative scenario would be that the armed men, having somehow learnt that the vessel was expecting a security team, had the good fortune to encounter a master who was so lax in his regard for the safety of his vessel that he let them board without even checking himself that they were the security team. The alternative scenario would then require the master to be both very courageous in steering the vessel away from Somalia and also very fortunate in having on board members of the Yemeni coast guard who did not appreciate that the vessel was not being steered towards Somalia as instructed. Similarly the chief engineer would have to be both very courageous in deciding to stop the engines and also very fortunate in having armed guards who, although they saw him enter the purifier room, were unable to find him a short distance to the aft of the purifier room. The armed guards would have to have had the foresight to have brought on board an IEID (for use in an unintended eventuality) and yet to have lacked the foresight to bring on board a suitable accelerant. The main engine having been unexpectedly stopped, the alternative scenario would then require the armed men to be unable to find the chief engineer (and to be unwilling to seek assistance from another engineer officer), to decide to abandon their plan to hijack the vessel and instead (for whatever reason) to activate the IEID with minimal delay and then to have the good fortune to locate, with minimal further delay, a suitable accelerant in an unfamiliar engine room. I am unable to accept that this sequence of improbabilities occurred. … it is an account which I “simply cannot swallow”. The master and chief engineer denied that they were involved in a conspiracy to damage the vessel by fire. That evidence must be tested in the light of the probabilities and the evidence as a whole … Having so tested their evidence I have concluded that it must be untrue.
“In addition to the above, there are several matters which, when viewed collectively rather than individually, point to the master and chief engineer being involved in a conspiracy to damage the vessel by fire. First, there is the fact that the vessel was drifting in the Gulf of Aden. That made it easier for the armed men in the small boat to come alongside. Second, there is the fact that the master did not sound the [alarm] signal when the small boat came alongside or thereafter until 0306. That meant that the authorities did not learn of the apparent attack until it was over. Third, there is the fact that the master had the crew’s passports ready. Fourth, there is the fact that the master, although he had time to fetch and bring with him a bag of personal belongings, did not take with him the vessel’s working chart and log. Fifth, there is the improbability of the chief engineer’s suggested “escape”. Sixth, there is the chief engineer’s failure to take any steps to fight the fire when on board the vessel. Seventh, there is the fact that the master and the chief engineer told untruths to the [US Navy] on the morning of 6 July. The master said that the intruders’ attention turned to the theft of money after the engines had stopped, which was untrue, and the chief engineer said that he had “sabotaged” the vessel’s engines, which was untrue.”
The judge naturally awarded underwriters costs against the bank. In practice, the successful party in English litigation does not get awarded 100% of its costs, but only a proportion – those which the winning party can show were reasonably incurred. But it is possible for a successful party to argue for a more generous basis of indemnity, which can make the difference between a (say) 60% and 80% recovery. After the main judgment, Teare had to decide whether to award costs on the standard basis or on the more generous “indemnity” basis. He decided in favour of the latter, saying that the bank’s claim was so fragile and weak that “there were times during the trial that I thought that there must have been some reason of which I was unaware that justified the bank in pursuing this claim against the war risk underwriters. But no such reason has materialised.” He characterised the bank’s position as “unrealistic”, citing the fact that it chose, “undeterred by the objective weakness in its case, to argue the case at length and on every point. The underwriters had to respond at length and on every point. In the result the bank lost on every point of substance and did so for reasons which could have been predicted at the commencement at the trial by an objective observer familiar with the case.” The claimants’ failure in respect of the claim that they had elected to bring was total.
Some people reading this story might think that in a well-ordered world, the court’s findings of premeditated dishonesty on a grand scale would result in Iliopoulos being, to use his phrase in the witness-box, “held responsible”. The current signs are to the contrary. Criminal proceedings in Greece against insurers’ representatives are continuing. The City of London police, despite its highly-publicised 2016 arrest, appears to evince no intention of prosecuting Iliopoulos for his attempted fraud on the London insurance market. The bank has recouped the loss on its loan under another insurance policy, intended precisely to respond in the event of fraud on the shipowner’s part. Iliopoulos continues through his ferry company Seajets to carry hundreds of thousands of people a year to and from the Greek islands. His public relations are certainly energetic: there was an article in the Greek press denigrating the quality of London insurance practices in maritime cases even before the judgment was officially released. Lloyd’s List, the newspaper which is supposed to serve the interests of the London market, has given the appearance at thumbing its nose at the outcome of the trial. In its recent 2019 Greek shipping awards, which post-dated Teare’s judgment, Iliopoulos was once again on hand to receive a prize; his daughter gave away another one; and the Greek shipping financier of the year was none other than Piraeus Bank. Cynthia Mockett (who attended many days of the trial) is no nearer to knowing why her husband was killed. And several newspapers (including Lloyd’s List) have this year given admiring coverage to the fact that Iliopoulos has been honoured by his local Greek community for his help in, of all things, rescuing the victims of a fire.