Marinakis and the extraordinary legal claims of a ‘smear campaign’ linking him to drug smuggling and match-fixing

It is the story of a football club owner fighting back against a “smear campaign” linking him to heroin smuggling, match-fixing and a number of other allegations that he strenuously denies, including being head of a criminal organisation known as The System.

The Athletic can reveal today that Evangelos Marinakis, owner of Premier League club Nottingham Forest, is suing one of his rivals from Greek football in a libel case that is in its early stages at the High Court in London.

According to U.S. court papers, Marinakis alleges in his UK action that Irini Karipidis, chairperson of Greek club Aris Thessaloniki, teamed up with Ari Harow, formerly the chief of staff to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to wage a six-month campaign of “false and defamatory” claims against the man who has bankrolled Forest’s return to England’s top division.

Under a cloak of secrecy, the court papers claim they arranged for an anti-Marinakis website — nottinghamforestfire.co.uk — to be set up, as well as a social media account, a YouTube channel and two mobile billboards that were driven around Nottingham before home games.

Court documents seen by The Athletic allege that in a series of articles, posts and videos about his ownership of Greek club Olympiacos, Marinakis was accused of being “the leader of a criminal organisation known as ‘The System’, through which he and others engaged in criminal and corrupt practices to gain control over national football in Greece, including fraud, attempted extortion, bribery, intimidation”.

The lawsuit alleges there were also plans to fly a plane over the City Ground, Forest’s stadium, with another anti-Marinakis message aimed at turning fans against him.

In filings to the United States District Court in New York, Marinakis’ lawyer, Christopher Scott, said his client was depicted as “deeply and actively involved in international heroin trafficking” relating to Noor One, a tanker that was intercepted in 2014 in the Greek port of Piraeus carrying 2.1 tonnes of heroin.

Marinakis was also accused, in the words of his legal team, of having “cynically and hypocritically” profited in secret from Russian oil despite publicly declaring his opposition to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The lawsuit alleges Karipidis even proposed and wrote a draft newspaper article questioning whether the Premier League had investigated Forest’s 1-0 victory over Huddersfield Town in the 2022 Championship play-off final (when their opponents had two penalty appeals turned down) as having been “fixed”. 

She went on to write that there were also “many rumours” about Olympiacos’ victory against Cypriot side Omonia in the 2020-21 Champions League play-offs. Karipidis’ proposed article offered no evidence of match-fixing. She alleged Marinakis had previously “sent a postal bomb to the bakery owned by the family of a Greek referee who refused to change a call during a game”.

It was, according to the lawsuit, part of an internationally orchestrated campaign against Marinakis alleging “serious criminal activity as well as other wrongdoing which strikes at the heart of his reputation for honesty and integrity, both professionally and personally”.

In a statement to The Athletic, Harow’s solicitor, Gerard Cukier, said: “The allegations made against Mr Harow and his company, Sheyaan Consulting, are absolutely denied. Mr Harow has unfortunately been caught up in a dispute between Mr Marinakis and Ms Karipidis. An application to set aside the proceedings against him and Sheyaan will be heard in the High Court on 31 October.”

The U.S. legal papers detail how, when Marinakis’ investigators set out to find who was responsible, the trail led them to a Texas-based digital marketing agency, Harris Media, that worked briefly with Donald Trump during the U.S. 2016 presidential election, as reported by the New York Times.

According to Marinakis’ claim, further investigation revealed that Brian Ruddle, the agency’s director of political operations, was responsible for creating the @nottinghamff X account that put out more than 200 posts and stated, as one example, that Marinakis had been “banned for being part of a match-fixing ring in Greece”.

Marinakis subsequently obtained a Texas state court disclosure order against Harris Media to identify who was behind a “coordinated, anonymous, media smear campaign”.

It was then that Marinakis allegedly found out Harris Media had received two wired payments linked to the campaign. Court records indicate one was for €29,950 (£25,000; $32,500) from Amani Swiss, a Cyprus-based company for whom Karipidis is the president and managing director, and her partner, Dimitris Messinezis, the sole shareholder. Another payment of $25,000 came from Sheyaan Consulting, an Israeli company for whom Harow is chief executive.

Marinakis, who took ownership of Forest in 2017, is suing both companies in London’s High Court for libel and aggravated damages for conspiracy. The Greek shipping tycoon is also taking action against Karipidis as the “apparent ringleader” and Harow for his alleged involvement.

(Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)

Marinakis has always denied being involved in any criminality and, though he has been investigated in the past in connection to match-fixing and Noor One, he has never been sanctioned for any offence of that nature. In his claim, his lawyers say he has suffered “enormous anxiety and distress” over what he regards as outdated and discredited allegations and that he has also incurred financial losses that were put at £2.1million when his claim was lodged in April.

Court documents reveal that Marinakis’ lawyers “geo-blocked” the relevant YouTube channel, as well as taking action to bring down the website and X account that used language such as “our club” and “paid for by fans”, allegedly to disguise who was behind it.

When Forest played Bournemouth on December 23 last year, a billboard van spent eight hours driving around Nottingham city centre, as well as the streets near the stadium, displaying the message “Why is Evangelos Marinakis on the Naughty List?” and directing people to go to the website to find out.

Two weeks later, Forest had an FA Cup tie at home to Blackpool. Another van did the same until Marinakis’ security staff stopped it on Pavilion Road, directly by the ground. The van showed a QR code linked to the website and a caricature of Marinakis that depicted him, in the words of his legal team, as an “evil and menacing figure”.

Anyone going to the website would, according to Marinakis’ claim, have seen a timeline for the years 2011, 2014, 2015, 2021 and 2023 and tabs entitled “Organized crime”, “Drug Trafficker”, “Match Fixer”, “Sanctions Evader”, “Murderer?” and “Money Laundering”. Readers were encouraged to “Stand for Justice and a Corruption-Free Future in Football!” by signing up for updates.

Marinakis, in turn, went to extraordinary lengths, via specialist lawyers and investigators, to find out who was responsible — and then bring the suspects before the courts.

One breakthrough came when Marinakis’ legal team made Twitter, as X was then known, the subject of a Norwich Pharmacal Order (NPO) — a disclosure order in England and Wales to allow information to be obtained from third parties who have knowingly or unknowingly been involved in wrongdoing.

Another NPO was made in January to Promogroup Ltd, the UK-based advertising agency that had supplied the van for the first billboard.

That led Marinakis’ investigators to Harris Media and, according to the U.S. court documents, helped to uncover a series of emails that, according to his litigation, placed Karipidis at the heart of the operation.

In the email chain filed with the U.S. court, entitled “Airplane banner” on December 18 last year, Ruddle appeared to explain to Karipidis and Harow that the weather in Nottingham was too bad for the plane to go up.

The Harris Media executive went on to say campaign adverts were being placed at 22 bus-stop locations in Nottingham and a van was ready “to drive around the stadium during the (Bournemouth) pre-game, the game and the post-game. We have an eight-hour slot… so we might as well use it all”. This, Ruddle added, was “well within our budget”.

Vincent Harris, the company’s founder and chief executive, appears to have been copied into the same email chain and also seemed disappointed about the bad weather disrupting plans for a plane banner. “I suggest we move forward,” Harris wrote, “and ‘worst case’ is we just really clobber him for the next home game!”

Harris, a political strategist, was described by Bloomberg in 2014 as “the man who invented the Republican internet”. He was hired by Trump in 2016 but was reportedly let go after just a week. He was previously on Senator Rand Paul’s team and, according to Marinakis’ legal arguments, had a working arrangement with Harow via a number of initiatives, including Harris Media’s involvement in Netanyahu’s electoral campaign in 2015. The company has offices in Austin as well as Miami, Ohio and Tel Aviv.

Harris at an event in 2016 (Kris Connor/Getty Images for Rare)

“Hi Vincent!” Karipidis replied, in broken English. “I can understand, the weather in Nottingham is very sh**ty all the time. From now on (it) will be every week like that so I suggest do not try again with these weather conditions if we are not sure. Better to the van and I believe we will have similar reactions! Please try what you think is better.”

The emails indicate that, on January 8, Karipidis emailed Harris Media for an update on “the plane and the bus stations”.

What the lawsuit does not speculate upon is what may have motivated Karipidis to target Marinakis — if his allegations are correct — and why their working relationship had, it seems, become so acrimonious.

Her brother, Theodore, is the owner of Aris, who are at the top of this season’s Greek Super League. Olympiacos are fourth in the table. The two men were once close allies, but that is understood to have changed dramatically over the past 18 months and Theodore is now seen as an ally of AEK Athens, one of Olympiacos’ main rivals.

Irini, who doubles up as the chairperson of the Hellenic Trade Council, is said in the lawsuit to have sent Harris Media a list of 80 journalists and their organisations, as well as 16 X accounts, to “tag” with their anti-Marinakis posts.

Marinakis, currently serving a five-match stadium ban for allegedly spitting towards a referee’s feet, is also seeking an injunction to ensure the relevant people do not make any more accusations about him.

“The smear campaign was deliberately designed to conceal the identity and involvement of the co-conspirators, who anonymised the publications on various platforms and created the false impression that a grassroots, fan-led campaign group was funding the campaign,” says Scott in the court documents. “The known co-conspirators also hid any ties to the campaign by using various entities as conduits for payments and transactions.”

Approached by The Athletic, Karipidis issued a no comment through her lawyers. She is, however, understood to be prepared to take on Marinakis in court and it is expected she and Harow will ask for the UK libel case to be struck out.

(Top photo: Naomi Baker/Getty Images)