CA-2024-000950 - [2025] EWCA Civ 1019

In March 2018, some three months before the policy was renewed, criminal charges were brought against a well-known Greek shipowner and public figure, Mr Evangelos Marinakis, and three other people alleging against each of them that he was a member of an organised crime group and involved in drug trafficking. The charges arose out of the detention in 2014 of another vessel, ‘NOOR 1’, in connection with drug smuggling and apparently related to the financing of the transaction rather than the actual trafficking, the traffickers themselves having already been prosecuted and convicted in 2016. Mr Bairactaris was one of the people charged alongside Mr Marinakis. Although the charges against Mr Marinakis were widely publicised, the charges against Mr Bairactaris were not.

Mr Bairactaris has always denied the charges against him and we were told that they have now been discontinued. He has remained a registered member of the Piraeus Bar Association with a thriving practice. It has never been the insurers’ case that he was guilty of these charges, but they do say that the fact of the charges was a material circumstance which ought to have been disclosed to them in accordance with the insured’s duty of fair presentation and that the failure to disclose this fact entitled them to avoid the policy.