By the late 2000s, Iliopoulos had augmented his passenger operations with a major presence in the oil trade. In 2008, a marine publication reported that he’d gone on a “buying spree,” picking up eight older tankers. One of them was the Elli, which would later come to grief off the Yemeni coast; another was the Brillante, which Iliopoulos acquired for $46 million, far more than his other purchases. He paid for it with a mortgage from Piraeus Bank, one of Greece’s largest lenders, which seemed to have provided Iliopoulos with much of his financing since he came into the industry. Iliopoulos’s
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