Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World's Most Secretive Industry

by Matthew Campbell

As he reviewed the files at his desk, Veale noticed that some of them had been signed by an individual whose name he hadn’t seen before: a man called Marios Iliopoulos. Iliopoulos had also offered personal loan guarantees. Based on that fact, Veale told Cunningham, he had a “high level of confidence” that Iliopoulos was the Brillante’s ultimate owner. When Cunningham heard the name, the Talbot executive nearly fell off his chair. “That’s the bloke from the Elli!” he exclaimed. The Elli was a tanker that had run aground off the coast of Yemen in 2009, after a fire broke out in its radio room. Talbot was part of the syndicate insuring its hull. A salvage team eventually towed the Elli away for repairs, but while they were in the process of pumping water into its ballast tanks for stability, the tanker suffered what lawyers called a “catastrophic hogging” near the Suez Canal. In layman’s terms, the ship’s bow and stern halves had sheared apart midway down the hull, splitting in two like a watermelon.