Drug-smuggling, match-fixing scandals … and a pop song: who is Ange’s new boss?

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When somebody completely new enters the public consciousness a very specific genre of journalism typically follows. Let’s call it the “Who is … ?” piece. For example ...

Who is Erin Patterson, host of the mushroom lunch that killed three people? Who was Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist shot dead in the US? Who is Raygun, the Olympic breakdancer who went viral? Who is Gout Gout, the uber-talented teenage sprinter likened to Usain Bolt?

The “Who is … ?″⁣ piece is also utilised when a public figure begins a new relationship with somebody less public.

A few come to mind. Who is Amal Alamuddin, the international human rights lawyer dating George Clooney? Who is Travis Kelce, the NFL star dating Taylor Swift? Who is Ella Emhoff, stepdaughter of Kamala Harris?

Depending on the subject, the content is varying degrees of interesting. Sometimes, however, you strike gold. Sometimes, as is the case with Ange Postecoglou’s new English Premier League boss, the keywords are “drug trafficking”, “match fixing” and “cigar smoking”.

So, without further ado ... who is Evangelos Marinakis, the Nottingham Forest owner cleared of wrongdoing on all the above allegations (except the cigar smoking)? What do we know about the Greek shipping billionaire who still owns an iPhone 7 in 2025? Which song lyrics did he write, who did he spit at, and why is he suing Benjamin Netanyahu’s former chief of staff? If he is also a philanthropist, and our Ange deems him worthy to work with? Is the rest just a misunderstanding?

The life and times of Marinakis could be presented like a Netflix documentary, spending the first half drip-feeding the audience only one version of the 58-year-old until they are convinced he is either only good or only bad, then smacking them in the face with the alternate reality. Colourful creatures like this exist everywhere – and there are certainly a few in football – which makes it tough to pick a point of entry.

Perhaps it’s best to begin with the easy stuff: shipping, media and football ownership.

Marinakis, who is from Piraeus, on the edge of Athens, and long married with four children, is the founder and chairman of international shipping company Capital Maritime & Trading Corp, having taken over his father’s fleet of seven tankers and grown it into some 120 vessels. In 2018 he merged his fleet with that of Donald Trump’s former commerce secretary Wilbur Ross (Diamond S Shipping), which he later labelled his “worst business decision”.

In 2017, he was named Greek Shipping Personality of the Year by British publication Lloyd’s List. Last year, he received an honorary doctorate from the renowned US-based Massachusetts Maritime Academy. He has also been at the forefront of reducing greenhouse gas emissions within the shipping industry, as part of an alliance that founded the Maritime Emissions Reduction Centre (MERC) in Greece.

Ange Postecoglou with Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis in July.

Marinakis the media mogul owns two of Greece’s most influential daily newspapers, Ta Nea and To Vima, and in 2019 launched a Greek television channel, One Channel. His company, Alter Ego Media, is the largest media organisation in Greece. A little-referenced detail is that he has also dabbled in songwriting and wrote lyrics for Greek pop artist Natasa Theodoridou’s smash hit Excitement (Exapsi), which reportedly had 1 million YouTube views within the first six days of its release in 2021.

Marinakis’ foray into football started in 2010, when he bought his hometown team Olympiakos and became president. The club has since won 11 domestic league titles and the 2023-24 Europa Conference League.

He became the majority shareholder of Forest in 2017 when the two-time European Cup winners (1979, 1980) had been struggling in the second-tier English Championship for almost two decades and narrowly avoided relegation to League One. He pledged to restore the club to its glory days and, under his stewardship and Steve Cooper’s management, they earned promotion to the Premier League in 2022 – for the first time since 1999.

In 2023, he also acquired Portuguese club Rio Ave.

These investments have cemented Marinakis as one of Greece’s most powerful figures, to the point where he was called an oligarch by Greece’s former prime minister and opposition leader Alexis Tsipras. It was not meant as a compliment.

This is where the controversial headlines begin.

The most enduring was a years-long investigation by the Greek state into allegations Marinakis was involved in trafficking the largest amount of heroin ever seized in Europe. The bust involved two tonnes of the stuff with a street value of more than €400 million ($705 million), smuggled into Piraeus aboard a small tanker called Noor One and hidden in warehouses and private homes. The case triggered a war of retribution that has left at least 17 people dead on three continents, and phone records exposed scores of police who the smugglers bought off, from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates.

Marinakis was embroiled in 2018, charged with financing and storing drug substances and setting up a criminal group to traffic and sell drugs. He denied any wrongdoing and accused the country’s leftist-led government of plotting against him, which his newspapers described as “a game of many years”. The case was closed in 2021 due to a lack of evidence.

Evangelos Marinakis, pictured at a home game at the City Ground last year, has his eye on everything at his football clubs.

At the time those charges were laid, Marinakis had just been cleared of his second set of match-fixing charges. The first related to the Koriopolis scandal – irregular betting patterns mostly involving Greek Cup and second-tier games in 2009 and 2010 – and he was acquitted in 2015. The second came in 2017, when he was one of 28 Greek football figures due to face trial as part of the country’s 2015 match-fixing scandal, in which players, referees, club executives and the football federation were accused of fraud, blackmail and forming a match-fixing ring. Eventually most charges were dropped, and courts acquitted all 28 defendants.

He was accused of being involved in the 2012 bombing of a referee’s bakery, which occurred days after Olympiakos suffered a 1-0 defeat to Xanthi. The bakery’s owner, Petros Konstantineas, was that game’s referee and claimed he had been pressured before kick-off to ensure Olympiakos “definitely” won. Again Marinakis denied any wrongdoing, and again all charges were dropped.

He is, right now, being investigated in relation to civil misdemeanours, prompted by the death of a riot police officer who was injured by a flare following an Olympiakos v Panathinaikos volleyball game in December 2023. Allegations once more denied, this time with a claim of a blackmail attempt.

Marinakis has taken his fight against the “smear campaign” all the way to the High Court in London, suing Irini Karipidis (chair of Greek club Aris Thessaloniki) and Ari Harow (formerly the chief of staff to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu) for allegedly waging a six-month campaign of “false and defamatory” claims. They include linking him to heroin smuggling and match fixing, and also being head of a criminal organisation known as The System. The libel case was filed late last year; in January, a judge ruled it can continue.

Nonetheless, the strenuous denial has been a semi-regular fixture in the repertoire of a man who gets about Greece with black-clad bodyguards but is also known for extensive philanthropic efforts.

Marinakis is a former city councillor for Piraeus and still carries out mayor-like duties, personally funding projects such as building playgrounds and soup kitchens. His personal website is replete with stories about his charity work: everything from providing refugee children from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq with meals, clothing and toys, to inviting Shakhtar Donetsk to play a “Stop War” fundraising friendly against Olympiakos in their first match since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2018, he donated €1 million to the emergency effort after wildfires killed 103 people and devastated the Attica coastline, and in 2017 coordinated the relief efforts when flash floods hit Mandra, killing 25 people.

The juxtaposition is weird to reconcile, but then much about him is unorthodox.

He reportedly likes the colour red. He does not like the colour green (Panathinaikos’ colour). Or purple (bad luck). Or black (unknown). He has a tattoo on his arm that reads: “Dream, Love, Create, Fight, Survive, Win.”

He takes defeat as a personal insult and will threaten – and sometimes take – action. Even if it is the start of the season, as Nuno Espírito Santo learnt this past week. He churns through players and managers at a rate ruthless even to rivals in the notoriously fickle Premier League. So far at Olympiakos he has employed 17 managers. At Forest, Postecoglou will be his eighth.

Marinakis celebrates with Olympiakos after winning the 2024 UEFA Europa Conference League final.

He likes – needs – to control the narrative. Apparently he even put out feelers to add some British media to his portfolio, offers that were declined. He keeps his cards close to his chest and values privacy. But he can also be volatile in public.

In 2011, after the full-time whistle in a Olympiakos-Panathinaikos derby (“the derby of the Eternal Enemies”), Marinakis had an on-field row with opposition striker Djibril Cisse that sparked a lawsuit and counter-suit for slander, verbal abuse and threats, and then libel (guess which was which).

In 2024, he was banned for five Premier League matches for spitting towards match officials after a 1-0 home loss to Fulham during which the visitors were awarded a penalty on VAR advice but denied Forest two penalty appeals.

Marinakis argued he was merely disposing of phlegm, caused by his cigar habit, and the incident was unintentional. “He cannot now remember if any spittle left his mouth but if it did (and he does not challenge that some might well have done) it certainly was not aimed at the referee’s feet and did not hit anybody,” his witness statement read.

The English Football Association rejected the defence as “completely implausible” based on statements and CCTV footage, and condemned the action as “an egregious display of disrespectful behaviour”.

In May he banned Gary Neville from the City Ground and told Jamie Carragher to “f--- off” for backing his Sky Sports colleague.

And, of course, he had stormed onto the pitch to confront the highly respected Nuno after a draw with Leicester City guaranteed the club would compete in Europe for the first time in three decades and took their Champions League hopes out of their hands. Neville called the move “scandalous” in a post on X, which might have had something to do with being denied access to the stadium as a co-commentator later that month. Other observers just couldn’t believe a shipping magnate with a net worth of about $US5.1 billion went in for the kill holding a long-discontinued iPhone 7, complete with wired EarPods.

Such public temperamentality is, based on the public record, matched behind the scenes. The Forest boardroom has, at times, been in a state of civil war. The rift with Nuno really ramped up with the July appointment of Edu, Arsenal’s former sporting director, as Forest’s new global head of football. The Brazilian is now one part of an informal triumvirate alongside Marinakis and super-agent Kia Joorabchian, whose extensive portfolio includes Edu. Joorabchian, who runs Amo Racing, has co-invested in a racehorse with Marinakis and appears to have his paws all over his friend’s stable of football clubs.

Marinakis, for his part, is said to be so hands-on his staff feel micromanaged.

“Marinakis runs that club with the same obsessive influence as a chap who runs a corner shop,” Mail sport football editor Ian Ladyman told the Whistleblowers podcast this week.

“He wants to be all over it. He wants to know who’s buying the Mars bars, when they’re buying them, who’s buying the Hula Hoops and why. I speak to people who have worked at Forest … even last season when they were doing brilliantly on the pitch, people were saying to me, ‘It’s chaos behind the scenes’.”

A factor in the general chaos, according to former Premier League referee Mark Clattenburg, is a culture clash between English and Greek football. Clattenburg, who worked directly under Marinakis during his time with Greece’s football federation (Marinakis also served as Greek Super League president), said it was normal in Greece for an owner to play a very active role in the day-to-day administration of a club.

“I was there four years. I understood the Greek mentality,” Clattenburg said. “For example, Marinakis would ask my opinion about something in the English game, and I often had to say, ‘You can’t do that’. I think Ange, having Greek heritage, that will help him understand the mentality of the club.”

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