The Lloyd’s List Podcast: Fire, fraud and murder on the high seas

THE Lloyd’s List Podcast is taking a temporary detour into the true crime genre this week. Our guest Kit Chellel is one of the writers behind the book that everyone in shipping should be taking to the beach with them this summer – Dead in the Water. The book tells the remarkable tale of the suezmax Brillante Virtuoso which was apparently attacked by pirates in 2011 and set her ablaze. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd’s inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. Soon after his inspection, he was murdered. The book, which was the result of a forensic investigation by two journalists from Bloomberg Businessweek, offers a compelling expose of a $100m fraudulent insurance claim Lloyd’s List readers will already be familiar with the ensuing court case which produced a judgment nearly 80,000 words long which concluded that the “orchestrator” of the events that led to the ship’s loss was Marios Iliopoulos, the Athens-based ultimate owner of the vessel. Mr Iliopoulos, the judge wrote, had a motive to want the vessel to suffer a fire to solve the “serious financial difficulties” his companies were facing. But as Kit Chellel explains, the case is about far more than how the vessel came to catch fire.