Nicolas Giannakopoulos

The central thread connecting Giannakopoulos to the Epstein network is the SoftBank shareholder campaign of 2015-2016. Alessandro Benedetti recruited Giannakopoulos as a subcontractor to discredit SoftBank executives Nikesh Arora and Alok Sama. ⁷ The campaign was financed by Rajeev Misra, then a senior SoftBank executive, who routed USD 500,000 through Standard Chartered Bank to Barkmere Group, a multi-jurisdiction shell structure controlled by Benedetti with entities in both Cyprus (Barkmere Limited, HE 338259, incorporated November 24, 2014) and the British Virgin Islands. Review of corporate filings suggests the timing of incorporation — weeks before the operation commenced — indicates Barkmere was created specifically to channel these funds. ⁸

Giannakopoulos's operational role involved distributing screenshots of Arora and Sama's private banking records and emails to journalists. ⁷ He also served as the nominal shareholder behind a formal complaint letter sent to the SoftBank board on January 20, 2016, drafted by Boies Schiller Flexner LLP partner Matthew Schwartz. Analysis of the legal relationships indicates a notable overlap: the same firm represented Epstein victims including Virginia Giuffre, placing it at a nexus of both Epstein and Epstein-adjacent legal operations. ¹³

Giannakopoulos also hired freelance journalist Mark Hollingsworth to pitch a SoftBank-related story to The Independent, which was published in October 2015. Email evidence suggests Hollingsworth would be compensated if the story ran, establishing a pay-for-placement media operation alongside the corporate sabotage campaign. Connection #436 ⁷

After Benedetti and Misra fell out, the operation was exposed in the Wall Street Journal in February 2020. SoftBank and Alok Sama filed defamation complaints against Giannakopoulos at the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office on December 23, 2016. Giannakopoulos counter-filed alleging computer attacks on his company Global Risk Profile. No public record of criminal conviction has surfaced. ¹¹

Running parallel to the SoftBank operation, Giannakopoulos conducted intelligence operations on behalf of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's government in connection with the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal. The centerpiece was a seminar held October 26-27, 2016, formally hosted by the Observatory on Security (OUS) at the University of Geneva's Global Studies Institute. ^{9 10}

According to reporting by the Sarawak Report, the seminar was designed as an intelligence-collection operation disguised as academic engagement. Giannakopoulos invited senior Malaysian civil society figures and 1MDB investigators, including Clare Rewcastle Brown, editor of Sarawak Report. ¹⁰ He promised that Swiss officials would brief attendees on the progress of Switzerland's 1MDB investigation. Former Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin and opposition MP Nurul Izzah Anwar were listed as speakers but did not attend. No Swiss officials appeared. Instead, Giannakopoulos steered discussions toward how frozen Swiss-seized 1MDB assets could be diverted to an NGO that attendees could join — intelligence collection disguised as civic engagement. ¹⁰

The seminar cost CHF 17,000, paid privately by Giannakopoulos rather than by the university as formal invitations implied. The university had no knowledge the event was taking place despite invitations sent in its name. ¹¹ After Sarawak Report exposed the operation in March 2017, the University of Geneva opened an internal investigation that found Giannakopoulos's appointment as Vice-Director of OUS was never formally endorsed, the seminar funding was never submitted or approved, and he had used university premises and branding without authorization. He was terminated in June 2017. His superior, Professor Frederic Esposito at the Global Studies Institute, was also implicated. ¹¹

The SCL Group's Southeast Asia office, based in Kuala Lumpur and directed by Azrin Zizal, provides an organizational link between Giannakopoulos's SCL partnership and the Malaysia-focused intelligence operations, though no direct evidence of SCL involvement in the 1MDB seminar has been established. ⁹

Before the 1MDB operation, Giannakopoulos executed a structurally identical covert influence campaign for the Kazakh government in 2014-2015. The target was Mukhtar Ablyazov, a fugitive Kazakh oligarch and regime critic living in exile. According to reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, FTI Consulting, a London-based PR firm serving Kazakhstan, activated Giannakopoulos's Organized Crime Observatory (OCO) to produce a purportedly independent report portraying Ablyazov as a swindler hiding behind claims of political persecution. FTI employee Jonathan Hawker coordinated the operation, and Giannakopoulos held meetings at Reed Smith law firm in London with FTI representatives. ¹²

Giannakopoulos claimed to have refused direct FTI payment for the OCO report but acknowledged accepting research contracts from companies close to the Kazakh government through his company Inside.co. ¹² The pattern — academic or NGO credentials deployed to produce reports that appear independent but serve the intelligence objectives of a state client — is identical to the mechanism used in the 1MDB seminar one year later. This establishes Giannakopoulos's modus operandi as a recurring business model rather than an isolated incident.

Giannakopoulos served as SCL Group's partner and agent in Switzerland from 2010 onward, with one of his Swiss companies sharing an address and phone number with SCL's Geneva office. ¹ This relationship placed him within the organizational infrastructure of Cambridge Analytica's parent company during the period when SCL/CA conducted election influence operations across multiple countries including Trinidad, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Kenya. Examination of regulatory filings reveals that none of these operations were registered under FARA or filed LDA lobbying disclosures. SCL International Group Ltd was itself registered as a BVI offshore entity (reg #677767, incorporated September 23, 2005, at Portcullis TrustNet Chambers, Road Town, Tortola). ¹⁴

The Cambridge Analytica connection creates a two-hop link to Steve Bannon, who served as CA Vice President from June 2014 to August 2016 — overlapping precisely with the period when Giannakopoulos ran the SoftBank operation. However, no direct evidence of Giannakopoulos-Bannon contact or coordination has been found. Richard Kahn forwarded a Senate Intelligence Committee article about Bannon being questioned about Cambridge Analytica to Jeffrey Epstein on December 6, 2018 ¹⁵, indicating Epstein's awareness of and interest in the CA ecosystem. ¹⁶

Analysis of the broader SCL/CA ecosystem reveals overlapping relationships with multiple intelligence-for-hire operations: Team Jorge (Tal Hanan's Israeli disinformation operation) did business with Cambridge Analytica; Psy-Group (Joel Zamel's firm, investigated by Mueller) established a CA relationship from December 2016; SCL Group did business with Michael Flynn in November-December 2016; SCL was partially owned by Vincent Tchenguiz; and Cambridge Analytica itself was owned by Gravitas Maximus LLC, the Mercer family vehicle. Cross-reference of these connections locates Giannakopoulos within a private intelligence ecosystem that intersected with multiple nodes in the Epstein network. ^{17 13}

Giannakopoulos does not appear by name anywhere in the Epstein document corpus — zero hits across 461,000+ documents in the DOJ Vol 11, LMSBAND, Unified DB, and DDoSecrets datasets. Analysis of records indicates his connection to the network is indirect, running through Alessandro Benedetti, who appears repeatedly in Epstein's records as "Allesandro de Benedetti-Paris." Benedetti is found in Epstein's Paris contact lists and calendar reminders from September-October 2013 ²³⁴, compiled by Lesley Groff. As late as January 28, 2019, Epstein emailed Eduardo Teodorani-Fabbri from his [email protected] account asking "Allesandro benedetti?" — indicating ongoing interest in Benedetti just months before Epstein's arrest ⁵. ⁶

Analysis of the operational ecosystem suggests the structural significance lies in shared networks rather than direct personal contact. Boies Schiller Flexner LLP was used by Giannakopoulos to send the SoftBank shareholder complaint letter and separately represented Epstein victims. ¹³ K2 Intelligence was hired to investigate SoftBank targets alongside the Giannakopoulos operation. Examination of the Epstein corpus shows Cambridge Analytica articles ¹⁵¹⁸ and Bannon's 985+ emails with Epstein, establishing that Epstein was monitoring and engaged with the same intelligence-for-hire ecosystem in which Giannakopoulos operated. ¹⁹

Following his termination from the University of Geneva in June 2017, Giannakopoulos continued operating through his network of private firms: Miles SA, OCO, Global Risk Profile, and Inside.CO SA. ¹¹ He founded Apex Fusion Foundation in Zug, Switzerland in 2024, pivoting into the blockchain sector. He continues to speak at industry conferences including the Corporate Intelligence & Security Conference, maintaining public-facing credibility in the intelligence-consulting market despite the exposure of his operations.