Hijacking and Kill in World Transport’s Grim Underbelly

This is a story aboutone of the most audacious financial frauds in history. A very complicated conspiracy involving a $100 million oil tanker and also the murder of someone involved. We now know that DavidMockett had sort of stumbled into one of the most lucrativemaritime frauds in history. He was assassinated with a bomb that was meant only for him.

This is the story of a single oil tanker that was attacked and burned in what everyone thoughtwas a piracy incident, but turned out to be somethingmuch darker and stranger. My assumption was that the days of Pirates of the Caribbeanare ancient history and everything cleans up. But the more we dug into whathappened to this one ship, the more criminality we found.

This story really exposedjust how corrupt and lawless, frankly, the globalshipping industry can be. My name's Kit Chellel. I'm a senior writer with Bloomberg and with Matthew Campbell,we are the authors of “Dead In The Water.” Brillante Virtuoso was kind of a workhorse of international trade. It was like thousands of other oil tankers.

Just taking a millionbarrels of from one port to another over and overagain, several times a year. And the Brillante was very large. It was a 275-meter-long vessel, which believe it or not, does not put it among thevery, very largest oil tankers and container ships, but it's huge. It's almost three football fields. And on this particular journey,.

It was heading from Ukraine to China and had just passed through the Suez Canal and was sailing out into the Gulf of Aden. Now, the Gulf of Aden sitsbetween Yemen in the north and the Horn of Africa,Somalia, in the south. And at the time of thisvoyage, summer of 2011, piracy was at its absolute height. There have been two more pirate attacks off the coast of Africa,.

Bringing the number toeight in the past 12 days. What used to go down severaltimes a week is that, you know, little fast-movingboat carrying seven or eight guys with AK-47swould come up alongside these gigantic cargo ships carrying hundreds of millionsof dollars worth of cargo. And they would, you know,clamber their way aboard, take control of the vessel andthen take it back to Somalia and demand millions of dollars in ransom.

Any sailors on board such a vessel would've known that they wereheading into waters where if pirates succeeded in getting aboard, they and their vesselcould be taken hostage and perhaps taken toSomalia and held there for ransom for months or even years. Which is why there was this extra measure taken for security. They decided they neededa secure, you know,.

A security detail to go withthem through the Gulf of Aden. It was nearly midnight, and there was a coupleof sailors on watch, both Filipino guys, andthey spotted on the radar a small craft approaching. At first they had no idea whatit was or what was going on, and of course they were terrified. But when the small boat approached they used a loud speaker to shout down,.

And the guys on the little vessel said, “We're security. We'rethe security detail. Can you lower your ladderso we can come aboard?” Within seconds of themarriving on the ship, they started waving their rifles around and commandeered the vessel, and it became clear very quickly this was a terriblesituation for all the crew who were rounded up andlocked in a TV room.

And then for the next couple of hours, they were sort of stuck in darkness, just listening and waiting, you know, dreading what might be happening. Their worst fear was thatthey'd be taken off to Somalia and locked in some prison, awaiting ransom payment to be paid. So they were all, youknow, completely terrified. The ship started to move.

And then there was a loud explosion, and smoke started pouring into the TV room where all the crew were waiting. And when they came out, theysaw that these armed men had disappeared, apparently fled, and left the Brillante Virtuoso carrying a million barrels of oil burning. So when a large commercial vessel is destroyed or seriously damaged,.

This whole industry ofpeople swings into action. And that's because adamaged commercial vessel that might be carrying,you know, 100, 200, $300 million of cargo or more, that might itself be worth$100 million or more. It is also, above all, a liability. That vessel is insured,and that insurance policy could be valued in the many,many, many millions of dollars. So among the very firstpeople who were brought in.

When there is a big marine accident, are what's called maritime surveyors. And a maritime surveyoris kind of like the person the insurance company would send if you had a tree fall on your house. The insurance companyneeds to, first of all, make sure that a tree actuallydid fall on your house, assess the damage, figureout if you, you know, perhaps pushed the tree ontoyour house intentionally,.

Write up a report, andbasically, all being well, that report is favorable and then your claim is paid. So a marine surveyor essentiallydoes that on massive scale. And in the case of the Brillante Virtuoso, there was a very good marine surveyor, a British guy who happenedto live in Yemen, in Aden, which was the nearest city towhere this incident occurred. So David Mockett is thisbig, brash confident guy.

With a booming laugh wholives an expat life in Yemen. And he knows the area very well, he's been there for a long time. And he's also, you know,an expert in shipping. He was once a master marinerwith a commercial navy, and he's got decades ofexperience doing this work. So, you know, it's a problem, it's difficult to tryand get out to a vessel 10 miles off the coastof Yemen that's ablaze.

But for someone like David Mockett, it's something he's morethan capable of doing. So he hitches a ride on a fishing trawler to get out to the Brillante Virtuoso. But he did have some initial trouble getting on board the Brillante. It was a bit slow to get permission. And the way that worksis that when there is a marine accident, typicallya vessel then becomes.

The property of what'scalled a salvage crew. And salvers are the 911service of the high seas. When a vessel runs intotrouble, comes to grief, salvage crews race to the scene to try and keep it from sinking,pull it off rocks, whatever needs to be done. And from that point on, theship is the responsibility of salvage crews, who ultimatelywork for the ship's owners. I think David Mockettwould've known pretty early on.

That there was something suspicious about what happened tothe Brillante Virtuoso. One of the things he noticed was there was no evidence of arocket-propelled grenade strike. Supposedly an RPG had started the fire. David saw no evidence of this. He was confused by thefact that the pirate attack had occurred in the middle of the night, which is not typically howSomali pirates operate.

They would usually strike in daylight. He didn't notice any evidenceof weapons being discharged, bullet holes or anything like that, which again, was was part of the story. So he didn't have any positivetheory of what had occurred. He just had certain suspicions that there was more to it than theinitial accounts suggested. And when he arrived andspoke to the salvage crew, their attitude was kind of strange.

They sat down and had dinner one evening, and the salvors werequizzing David Mockett about what he was doingin a place like Yemen. And the Greek salvage captain said to him, “You should be at homewith your grandchildren. You shouldn't be in a place like this.” David Mockett went backto his office in Aden and started the processof sending his reports back to London so the insurers.

Could get a clear idea of what happened. And in those early reports, you can see that he's suspiciousabout the whole thing. And indeed he tells his employers, “I need to go and findout what's happened.” He's going to go and talk tohis local government contacts. He's going to dig a bit deeper and try and find out the true story, but he never gets a chance to do that.

So on July 20, 2011, abouttwo weeks after the attack and fire that all but destroyedthe Brillante Virtuoso, David was working in hisoffice in Aden as usual. He typically got to workvery early in the morning, you know, between 7 and 8. He would work until lunchtime,and he would go home, have lunch at home, stayhome for a few hours and then return to work later in the day. And, totally normal morning,he drove to his office, parked.

And when it came timeto go home for lunch, he got up, walked out the hall,climbed into his Lexus SUV and turned the key,drove out of the car park of this small office building,where he had his workspace, and then onto a very busy road, one of the main roads of Aden, actually. And he hadn't gone morethan a couple hundred meters when a bomb that had been placed under the driver's seat detonated,.

Killing him instantly. There wasn't a big explosion. It was a very targetedincident in a way that really, you know, people afterwardscould only explain as being assassination. Whoever placed that bombwanted to kill David Mockett. So the British governmentdid take some action, as it does when a Briton is killed abroad. The Foreign Office did try andascertain the circumstances.

Of what had occurred. Ultimately, the Met policesent an investigator to Aden to liaise with the Yemenipolice, but really, there was not much theBritish government could do. Yemen at this time wasincredibly dangerous. There were no Britishdiplomats in Aden whatsoever. There was no British presence at all. You know, after thedeath of David Mockett, there was a there was aninquest into his death,.

And the coroner found thathe'd been unlawfully killed but didn't know who had done it. There was no evidence asto who had killed him, but there was evidence at that inquest that he'd been targeted because he was on the verge of uncoveringa criminal conspiracy. But after that finding, you know, there was no police action.There was no full investigation. It was all just sort of forgotten about.

The only thing that was leftwas an insurance dispute. So when a large vessellike the Brillante Virtuoso is destroyed, or effectivelydestroyed in this case, insurance companies,specifically insurers who operate through the Lloyd's ofLondon insurance market, are on the hook for a great deal of money, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars. In this case, the vessel itself, what's called the hull insurance,.

Was worth about $80 million. There was also $100million in cargo insurance because the oil on boardwas insured separately from the vessel itself. So this is a very large liability, even for big insurancecompanies, even at Lloyd's, which is the world's mostimportant insurance market where they deal in huge transactions. And of course, if you are onthe hook for that much money.

You generally wouldnot want to pay it out, unless you're very confidentthat the claim is legitimate. In practice, they might settle,you know maybe pay you 50%, or maybe come to someother amicable arrangement. What they're very unlikelyto do is to go to court to try and fight you about it. However, in the caseof Brillante Virtuoso, these London insurers, looking at this huge billwith which they were faced.

And looking at the circumstancesof what had occurred, and also taking into accountthe death of David Mockett, who was one of their own, a creature of the Lloyd's worldand of the maritime world, they decided to fight andto go nose-to-nose in court. And this insurance dispute had become, you know, overtly hostile. The Greek ship owner is aguy called Marios Iliopoulos, and they decided they weren'tgoing to pay his claim.

On the basis that they didn't believe it was a genuine act of piracy. And so it sets the scene for this high-stakes London lawsuit, which turns out to be thebest chance we're going to get to really understand what happened here. The owner specifically was aman named Marios Iliopoulos, who was a prominent Greek shipping tycoon, owned a fleet of oil tankers,.

Also the owner ofsomething called Seajets, which is one of the mostpopular fast-ferry services linking Athens to placeslike Mykonos and Santorini. And one of the fun things toknow about Marios Iliopoulos is he has a hobby. He's a rally driver and avery successful rally driver. He's known in the rallyworld as Super Mario. He tends to do quite well in rally races. Really a pursuit thatrequires nerves of steel.

And a certain disregard for risk, which would probably come inhandy in the shipping business. Even years after the event, no one had got a satisfactory story out of the captain or the chief engineer of the ship. No one had sat down andinterviewed the salvage crew. Any evidence of what happened to the ship had been destroyed. The ship was sent off to ascrapyard and torn to pieces.

So the insurers had an enormouschallenge on their hands to prove that this was an act of fraud rather than an act of piracy. When you're seeking to invalidate in court an $80 million insurance claim, or a nearly $80 million insurance claim, you need a huge amount of evidence. And one of the things you do is you hire private investigators.

And there is a smalluniverse of these guys, typically ex-police, who doa lot of insurance cases. So in this case, there weretwo private investigators who were hired named RichardVeale and Michael Conner. And they were diggingdeeper and deeper into what had happened to the ship and what happened to David Mockett. And they were doing, you know, the work that should have been done.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, which is find the sailors,find the maritime officials, find the witnesses to what happened, and talk to them and get their stories. One of the whistle-blowerswho came forward to tell the truth about the fraud onthe Brillante Virtuoso was working with the salvage crew and arrived at the sceneshortly after the attack, and was there as the salvage crew ensured.

That the fire didn't go out, that the ship was completely destroyed and that the insurance fraudhad a better chance of success. But because he was based in Yemen, because he knew the ship owner and because he knew thethe salvage captain, had known them for several months, he witnessed all these events happening. He witnessed the planning.

He knew that a vessel wasgoing to come to Yemeni waters and be attacked and destroyedin an insurance fraud. He had absolutely vitalinformation for the police and for the insurance investigators. But he put his life atrisk by revealing it. He had a life in Greece, andhe had to flee in terror. You know, he had to gettaken away by armed guards and put on a plane to the UK. And, you know, when hegave evidence in court,.

The Greek whistle-blower wasflanked by police officers from an unknown location. Like, he's still living in hiding. They also were able tointerview a member of the crew who admitted later on thathe had faked his story because he'd been threatenedby Marios Iliopoulos. So piecing all this evidence together, they were able to assemblea body of evidence that they felt was strong enoughto really fight this case.

The judge takes a few weeksto hand down his decision, but when he does, you know,it's a damning indictment of the ship owner. He says that Marios Iliopoulosis a dishonest witness, that he disgracefully threatenedmembers of the courts, and that he's not tellingthe truth about, you know, what happens to the ship andwhat happens in the lawsuits. And his misconduct is so serious that this claim is thrown out.

A prosecution of DavidMockett's murder by the UK was always gonna be a very long shot. This crime, the murder,occurred in a faraway land where Britain has no presence,obviously no jurisdiction. So expecting a Britishprosecution for that act, I think was alwaysgoing to be a long shot. What I am much more surprised by is that no British law enforcement agency has seriously pursued a prosecution.

In what a London judgehas now ruled was a fraud. One of the reasons thatthe police struggled to get to grips with whathappens in maritime fraud is that it takes place in the cracks between the traditionalareas of law enforcement. In this case, you had aGreek-owned ship carrying oil that was being tradedout of Cyprus to China, crewed by Filipino sailors, flying the flag of Liberia in West Africa.

So you've got seven or eightdifferent nation states already involved, and the question is, who prosecutes this crime? Whose job it is to deal with this? And the reality of law enforcement is that actually no one wants the job. It's incredibly difficult to investigate and prosecute any fraudthat happens out at sea. And so most police forces around the world.

Just decide that it's not for them to do, and they can't do it. And in the case of the Brillante Virtuoso, the police were interested.They were given evidence that something untoward had happened, and they decided it wasgoing to be too difficult to prosecute a case. No one has ever been prosecuted. No one has ever been charged.

For a very significant fraud that was attempted againstthe Lloyd's market, one of Britain's most importantfinancial institutions. David Mockett spent alifetime either working at sea or in far-flung ports around the world. And, you know, he waslooking forward to spending, finally spending some timewith his wife and his daughters and their grandchildren who loved him. And, you know, the tragedyof the Brillante Virtuoso.

Is that he was killed beforehe had a chance to do that. Iliopoulos did actually do OK financially, out of this, believe it or not. One of the things thathappened was that the bank, which had loaned the money to Iliopoulos to buy the BrillanteVirtuoso, wrote off the debt in the course of this litigation, concluding that it wouldnever be recovered. So from the debt side,he was free and clear.

By destroying the vesselwith a fire, he was able to, you know, escape debts of inthe region of $60, $70 million, and the ship was losingenormous amount of money and was coming to towardsthe end of its life. So from a purely financial point of view, destroying the Brillante Virtuoso was the best thing he could have done. Part of me has expectedpeople in the shipping world to come out and say, “It's not that bad.

You know, it's not as bad as this one ship makes it appear to be.”But no one's done that. And, you know, unfortunately I think, there is this criminalunderbelly to global shipping that is thriving. And there seems to be very little that anyone can do about it. And the more you dig, theworse it seems to look.

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