Drugs, murders and corruption: all the accusations against Marinakis, “the Greek Berlusconi” president of Olympiakos
The Tycoon has been at the center of disturbing stories for years, including dead witnesses, explosions and international affairs
ROMA – Evangelos Marinakis should have bought Monza. It was said that it was a negotiation already started by Silvio Berlusconi. Precisely Marinakis, “the Greek Berlusconi”. Instead he has remained, for now, out of Italian football. Last night he beat him: his Olympiakos took the Conference League away from Fiorentina, the first European trophy for a Greek team in history. But Marinakis has a remarkable history, regardless of his team, and of football.
“He was born” a very powerful shipowner, and is the head of a media empire in Greece. The parallel with Berlusconi is not far-fetched: thanks to the media resonance, Marinakis entered the political field, becoming a municipal councilor of Piraeus in 2014 with a party created by himself. With his party he got Yannis Moralis, the vice-president of Olympiakos, elected mayor twice. He was also the president of the top Greek football division.
But above all, Marinakis’ long career is crossed by various types of accusations. Above all, corruption and match-fixing. In 2011 he was forced to resign as president of the Football Federation, so he had his trusted man elected.
The most disturbing story, however, is the one that sees him implicated in the case of international drug trafficking, told in great detail report by New Repubblic. Charges dropped, after several key witnesses were mysteriously murdered.
It all begins with a seizure of drugs on board the Noor One ship. The seizure triggers “a long series of seismic shocks in Greece and in the world”, reports New Republic – The planners of the smuggling operation turned against each other in a war of revenge that resulted in the death of at least 17 people on three continents. Telephone records reveal dozens of policemen who have been bought by smugglers, from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates”.
The investigation in Greece into who financed Noor One soon concerns the Greek oligarch Marinakis, who the newspaper defines as “huge, surrounded almost everywhere by bodyguards dressed in black. He is also a person very used to having his own way. A gallery owner in central Athens once told reporters the story of a precious painting that Marinakis wanted to buy. It wasn’t for sale. Two days later, a group of men stormed the tunnel. In 2012, 13 years after inheriting a fleet of oil tankers from his father, Miltiadis Marinakis, a shipowner born into a clan of Cretan bell makers, had assumed full ownership of one of Greece’s most famous football clubs, Olympiacos . Hebegan to convert Piraeus, the second largest container port in the Mediterranean, into a virtual feudal estate. It has purchased blocks of its real estate, sponsored food drives for refugees landing on its docks, adorned the streets with statues of Greek heroes. He presented himself as the patron of his working class”.
“In May 2014, as the Noor One headed towards the Suez Canal loaded with heroin, Marinakis was throwing himself into politics. That month he won a seat on the Piraeus city council.” “As his influence continued to grow, Marinakis emerged as a global financier. In 2017, he bought the historic English football club Nottingham Forest for 50 million pounds, even though it was under investigation for a match-fixing scandal in Greece, and an alleged bomb attack to a bakery”.
“Marinakis has also forged alliances with Beijing, which acquired the port of Piraeus for a pittance in 2016 as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, designed to further circulate global trade flows through China. In Washington, he mounted another front in the international offensive that culminated in a $1.7 billion merger in 2018 between his tanker fleet and Diamond S Shipping. However, the main new hub of Marinakis’ vast commercial empire is the Persian Gulf.”
“But just as all this was happening – the takeover of football clubs and the conclusion of lucrative oil contracts – the Piraeus authorities began investigating Marinakis and three of his associates on charges of having created a criminal organization that financed the trafficking and sale of drugs“.
“Marinakis’ alleged connection also raised the question of what he may have done over the years to erase evidence of his involvement. “Are any of Marinakis and Noor’s witnesses still alive?”, asked the leader of a rising populist party in the Greek parliament in November 2019. In a chamber of Piraeus court, over the course of three years and hundreds of hours of testimony and cross-examination, almost no witness, prosecutor or judge had ever said Marinakis’ name aloud. But outside the slow-moving legal inquiry into the Noor One affair, a new, even more damning story has been told about Greece. A decade of austerity had just gutted the nation’s gross domestic product by a third and wreaked financial havoc on its working class. But his shipping magnates, chief among them Marinakis, had reaped more profits than ever. This windfall came thanks to legislation passed under the 1967-74 Greek military dictatorship that rewarded the country’s shipowners with minimum tax rates and thanks to a political class that did not punish them when, even at the height of the financial crisis, they continued to bring those earnings abroad”.
Among the various disturbing pieces of the puzzle there is one worthy of note: “three months after the Noor One reached Elefsina, the CEO of Marinakis’ shipping company flies from the city of Fujairah to Athens. Upon arrival he is asked to open his suitcase. His luggage contained 622,000 euros in 500 euro notes. For the authorities this is clear evidence of amoney laundering transaction“.
Marinakis has always denied any connection with Noor One. “He instead compares himself to Socrates, a wise man condemned by a state that does not appreciate his services,” the New Republic piece concluded.