A Houthi-linked exchange house, crude oil for Hezbollah, and two merchant ships at the centre of an international legal dispute. iMEdD and The National investigated the case and spoke with him.
“Mr. Mallah is not in the office. I am only here today to clean up.” The man, speaking broken Greek at the doorstep of a first-floor office in an ordinary apartment building on Ch. Trikoupi Street in Piraeus, couldn’t provide any further details.
Syrian ship-owner Abdul Jalil Mallah, or captain Mallah as he is known in Piraeus, was placed on the U.S. sanctions list in 2021 on charges of facilitating the financing of Hezbollah and Houthi rebels in Yemen. Four years later, he contacted iMEdD from Syria, saying he was the victim of a setup. He insists he has stopped doing business in Greece, but traces of his activity can still be found in the country.
The shipping company Mallah Ship Management Co Ltd was registered with the UK Companies House in September 2012. Mallah is listed as one of its two directors, with a registered address at Sachtouri Street in Piraeus. A month later, the company applied for and received permission to set up an office in Greece. Mallah is listed as the representative of the Greek office, with a registered address at Ch. Trikoupi Street in Piraeus.
In 2015, Mallah Ship Management’s Greek office had its operating license suspended for failing to renew the required bank letter of guarantee, as mandated by Greek regulations. Before this, the company reportedly liquidated its fleet selling five ocean-going cargo ships within a few months and raising approximately $20 million, Greek media reported. Around the same time, Mallah’s name stopped being listed in the the UK company registry.
The US Sanctions
An investigation by iMEdD and The National reveals that in July 2019, captain Mallah, through three companies, entered into an agreement with subsidiaries of the U.S. firm Oaktree Capital Management (OCM). OCM financed the acquisition of two cargo ships—the “Amethyst” and the “Courage”—which were to be chartered by Mallah’s companies for a specified period, with an option to purchase them at the end of the contract. This type of agreement, known as a bareboat charter, is common in the shipping industry.
for ships at the port of Piraeus. Alexandros Vlachos / ANA
The agreement was set in motion, but in June 2021 something unexpected happened. Mallah was placed under US sanctions because, as the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) stated, he facilitated the financing of Hezbollah and the Houthis. According to U.S. authorities, a key figure in the case is Sa’id al-Jamal, an Iranian businessman who allegedly ran a network of vessels and front companies smuggling Iranian fuel.
The sanctions list states that Mallah and another Syrian national based in Turkey “facilitated transactions worth millions of dollars to Swaid and Sons, a Yemen-based exchange house associated with the Houthis.” It also notes that “Mallah has facilitated the shipment of Iranian crude oil to Syria“and “worked with Sa’id al-Jamal to send millions of dollars’ worth of Iranian crude oil to Hizballah.“
Mallah’s assets and accounts were blocked, and the deal with OCM’s subsidiaries collapsed. The companies claimed they had the right to terminate the charter of the two merchant ships after the Syrian national was placed under sanctions. According to British court documents, they succeeded in recovering the “Amethyst,” but not the “Courage”.
The Trials in London
The OCM subsidiaries took legal action against Mallah’s three companies, leading to a high-profile trial at the High Court in London in the first half of 2022. Mallah’s legal team argued that the Syrian businessman had transferred all management rights of his companies to four individuals. This, they claimed, was done to distance the companies from his personal inclusion in U.S. sanctions and to enforce the chartering agreements with the OCM subsidiaries. Mallah’s lawyer referred to one of these individuals, identified as Y.D., as the person “controlling the companies after Mallah’s removal.”
Judge Andrew Smith ruled that Mallah’s side had provided no written or oral evidence proving he was no longer the beneficial owner of the companies. The British court also determined that Y.D. was, in fact, acting as Mallah’s proxy and ruled in favor of the OCM subsidiaries.
Mallah’s legal troubles deepened when OCM’s subsidiaries sought £1 million in legal costs. In a court ruling in May 2024, he was sentenced to prison for fraud in court. More specifically, as noted, he failed to respond to a request to declare his assets, and when he finally did, he claimed he had never received the summons at his Piraeus address because he had already left Greece. Judge Sara Cockerill ruled that Mallah and his legal team had presented false documents and described as “demonstrably false” his claim that he was not the true property owner in Greece.
In Piraeus
The address on Ch. Trikoupi Street in Piraeus, mentioned in the British court rulings and Mallah’s company registers, houses a six-storey apartment building. The neighbourhood is quiet, and nothing on the building’s exterior — such as cameras or a security guard — suggests that it is the residence of a ship mogul.
The man who answered the door on the first floor said that he had come by chance that day to clean the place. He mentioned that Mr. Mallah “hadn’t been at the office for a while” and assured us he would pass along our message for him to contact us. From the office doorway, shelves filled with files and documents were visible inside. Just inside the building’s entrance hall, on the notice board displaying shared expenses for all residents for December 2024–January 2025, the name Mallah Ship Management was listed alongside five apartments.
Mallah’s entry in the Greek Land Registry lists five properties in the Ch. Trikoupi building in Piraeus. The corresponding records indicate that these properties have been seized by the OCM subsidiaries, with whom Mallah is in a legal dispute over the ships. However, no auction listings for these properties appear on Greece’s e-auction platform (e-auction.gr).
Mallah, now 50 and a graduate of merchant marine studies, had settled in Sweden before moving to Greece. He obtained a Greek identity card and a Greek VAT number, but in 2024, his identity card was revoked, though the official provision does not specify a reason.
Two Piraeus-based lawyers who had handled Mallah’s legal battle with the OCM subsidiaries at an earlier stage stated that Mallah is regarded as a significant figure in the shipping market. “At one point, he owned or controlled more than 50 ships. When he got caught up in US sanctions, it became a widely discussed issue in Piraeus, and at events with shipping industry professionals,” they said.
The first explanation presented by Mallah’s lawyers for his inclusion on the sanctions list was that he unknowingly did business with a Yemeni exchange linked to the Houthis. The second was that one of his ships had, at some point, been chartered by a Nigerian company that was targeted by Western authorities. “He couldn’t have known about it. This is a matter for the bank, which can verify the origin of the payments,” one lawyer in Piraeus said. One British court ruling mentioned that the captain of the “Courage” cargo ship had actually reported two trips from Turkey to Lagos, Nigeria, in June 2021.
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Captain Mallah’s Response
We tracked down the two ships central to the legal dispute. The “Amethyst,” released after the London court ruling, was spotted in open shipping databases sailing in the Gulf of Oman in late January 2025. The second ship, the “Courage,” remains anchored in Latakia, Syria.
According to the Equasis shipping database, a company based in Maroussi, Athens, is listed as the International Safety Manager (ISM) for the “Courage.” The same company is described in the British documents as being controlled by Mallah. Records from the Greek Government Transparency Portal (Diavgeia) show that in June 2021, Greek authorities accepted the company’s letter of guarantee, which was 19 days overdue, allowing it to continue operating an office in Greece. In an interesting coincidence, Mallah was added to the US sanctions list the day before.
The company’s legal representative in Maroussi is listed as Y.D., the same individual the British court had designated as Mallah’s proxy. In a phone call with iMEdD, Y.D. denied any connection to the company or the ship. However, he assured us that he would pass on our request for an interview with the Syrian ship-owner. A few days later, Mallah’s first message arrived in our inbox.
“I have nothing to do with Hezbollah and the Houthis. This is a big lie against me to steal from me,” he wrote. “They are making false claims and statements built on deception in order to take over the company I was running,” he added. In a later message, Mallah sent five court rulings from Syrian and United Arab Emirates courts, which he claimed proved the accuracy of his statements.
According to the court rulings, whose authenticity could not be verified, the OCM subsidiaries allegedly owe him around €20 million related to the two ships—either due to his partial ownership or as security for the release of the one still anchored in Syria. OCM did not respond to our written questions.
“Anything built on falsehood is a lie,” Mallah wrote in one of his last messages.
Translation: Anatoli Stavroulopoulou.
Read all articles and analyses of the Special Report: “Armories of the Middle East” here.
This article was first published on Feb. 22 by the weekend edition of the newspaper “TA NEA”.
