Marinakis v Karypidou: High Court finds anti-Nottingham Forest campaign publications defamatory at common law

Mr Justice Johnson handed down judgement on 20 May 2026 in Evangelos Marinakis v Eirini Karypidou & Ors [2026] EWHC 1192 (KB), resolving preliminary issues on meaning, defamatory character and the fact/opinion distinction across 17 publications forming the basis of a libel and unlawful means conspiracy claim valued between £1m and £5m.

The campaign and the parties

The claimant, Evangelos Marinakis, is the owner of Nottingham Forest FC and Olympiacos FC. He alleged that between November 2023 and March 2024 an anonymous campaign, ostensibly directed at Nottingham Forest supporters, published a series of allegations across three website articles, six YouTube videos, six X posts and two LED billboard vans driven around Nottingham on matchdays.

The first defendant, Eirini Karypidou, chairs both Aris Thessaloniki FC and the Hellenic Trade Council HETCO. The second defendant, Ari Harow, is a political consultant and founder of the third defendant, Sheyaan Consulting Limited, an international advocacy consultancy based in Israel. All defendants deny responsibility for the publications. The first defendant additionally disputes that they are defamatory; the second and third defendants accept defamation at common law but contest the statutory threshold under section 1(1) of the Defamation Act 2013.

Meanings established

Applying the Koutsogiannis principles and the Chase framework, Johnson J accepted the claimant's position on Chase level across the publications. The three website articles were found to bear, respectively: a Chase 1 assertion that Marinakis had hypocritically profited from transporting Russian oil whilst publicly condemning the invasion of Ukraine; a Chase 2 meaning that there were strong grounds to suspect his active involvement in trafficking 2.1 tonnes of heroin to Europe; and a Chase 1 meaning that he was the leader of a criminal organisation which used fraud, extortion, bribery, intimidation, match-fixing and a bomb attack on a referee's bakery to control Greek football.

The first defendant had argued that the second website article reached no higher than Chase 3, pointing to question marks in the headline and first sentence. The court disagreed, noting that references to "startling evidence" of the claimant's "potential involvement" and to revelations that "further intensified suspicions" took the article squarely to Chase 2.

On fact versus opinion, Johnson J agreed that the words "cynically and hypocritically" in the first article were evaluative, but declined to allow those words to colour the whole piece. The factual substance of the Russia/Ukraine allegation supplied the basis for the expressed opinion; it did not transform the article into pure opinion.

Hyperlinks and the reasonable reader

A notable feature of the judgement is its treatment of hyperlinked material. The YouTube videos, X posts and billboards were brief publications that, for the most part, directed readers to the website. Johnson J held that the hypothetical reasonable reader would follow those hyperlinks, because the shorter publications either made no sense in isolation or plainly did not tell the whole story. The richer meanings of the website articles were therefore imported into those publications, a finding that substantially broadened the defamatory content attributed to each.

The third and fourth YouTube videos, which stood alone without functional hyperlinks, were treated on their own terms and found to mean, respectively, that the claimant was guilty of match-fixing and that he was an illegal drug trafficker.

Significance

The judgement is confined to the preliminary issues and makes no finding on truth or the ultimate outcome of the claim. Statements of case will now require amendment to reflect the established meanings. The substantive defences of truth, honest opinion and publication on a matter of public interest, advanced by the first defendant, remain to be determined at a later stage.