Revealed: How Hezbollah fundraisers helped finance the €157m MV Matthew drug operation – 1v1 Video Chat & LIve Streaming & Influencer Subscription

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Revealed: How Hezbollah fundraisers helped finance the €157m MV Matthew drug operation

Eight relative bit players in the drama have been sentenced today – this is the story of the smuggling operation’s origins.

1.46pm, 4 Jul 2025

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THE KINAHAN CRIME group and international drug criminals partnered up with Iranian fundraisers for Hezbollah and paid €5 million up front for the cocaine that was to be shipped to Ireland on board the MV Matthew, The Journal has learned.

The money was handed over to a South American drug cartel and an agreement was made that the estimated €152 million in profit from distributing the drug would be split between the various entities who put the cash up.

Irish authorities – including the specialist forces of the Army Ranger Wing – intercepted the cargo ship off the Waterford coast and staged a dramatic raid in September 2023.

To date, the shipment – worth around €157 million in total – is the biggest drug seizure in the history of the Irish state.

Eight men found guilty of playing a part in the operation were sentenced today at the Special Criminal Court, they were sentenced to between 13 to 20 years in jail.

The LÉ William Butler Yeats escorts the MV Matthew to Cork on 26 September 2023.David Creedon / Alamy Live News

David Creedon / Alamy Live News / Alamy Live News

The Hezbollah link

The ship – originally registered to a legitimate Dubai-owned company – was purchased, in complicated steps, by intermediaries and ultimately placed in the control of the drug traffickers.

The front company set up by the traffickers was ‘Matthew Maritime Inc’ which even had its own website, where the firm touted its experience in shipping and referred to its ‘expert team’. The address for the company was on Ajeltake Island in the pacific archipelago of the Marshall Islands.

It was all, of course, a ruse. The Matthew had been bought, not for the purposes of setting up a single-ship bulk carrier business, but to ferry drugs across the Atlantic to Ireland.

The ship collected the drugs off Venezuela, using a method to trick ship-tracking tech known as ‘spoofing’ – essentially, manipulating data to give the impression the ship is in a false location.

The bulk carrier departed from Curacao, off the Venezuelan coast, and sailed across the Atlantic before arriving in Irish territorial waters. She was sailing under the flag of Panama – a common practice in the world of international shipping as it’s (quite literally) a flag of convenience.

The plan was to meet up with a trawler, the Castlemore, which had been purchased with the aim of ferrying the 2.25 tonnes of drugs ashore for distribution in Ireland and across Europe – a smuggling method known as ‘coopering’.

The Castlemore was to be sailed out of Castletownbere – a port town some 125 km south-west of Cork city on the Beara Peninsula – to meet up with the smuggling ‘mothership’.

Sources we spoke to ahead of today’s sentencing said Venezuelan-based Hezbollah operatives were key to the MV Matthew operation. Investigators have assessed that the smuggling operation was ultimately managed from Dubai by the Kinahan Cartel.

It was in the South American phase of the operation where the connections to Iran and Hezbollah were of most benefit.

Venezuela and its regime have close connections to Iran and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group which places itself as an alternative to the government in Beirut and has been involved in a recent war with Israel.

It’s likely the criminals raising funds for Hezbollah came on the radar of the group behind the MV Matthew operation after the Kinahan OCG had developed connections to other drug traffickers with links to Iran.

Whatsapp and Signal groups

The operation was managed on Whatsapp and Signal. When gardaí examined those messaging groups they determined that the main criminal commander was in the Emirates but that there were also participants in Germany, Turkey, Iran, Britain, the Netherlands and Spain.

Sources we spoke to said that the Matthew was in poor condition – its accommodation in a dishevelled state and much of the machinery in a state of disrepair.

The drugs gang deployed a retired Ukrainian fishing boat captain – Vitalyi Lapa, one of the eight men sentenced earlier today – to Ireland in July of 2023 and he stayed in various hotels in the Republic and in Northern Ireland.

His job would be to operate as the expert mariner on a fishing boat that would be bought from unsuspecting fishers somewhere in Ireland. It is believed he was to be joined by an Irish gangster but that that plan fell through and he was joined instead by British man Jamie Harbron.

Harbron – who was also sentenced today after entering a guilty plea in the trial last December – pitched himself in Garda interviews as an unwilling vulnerable drug user who was dispatched to Ireland to pay off a debt he owed to criminals.

Sources have said that the reality of intelligence gardaí have gathered is that he was a much more willing participant and further up the food chain.

In court it was said that his apparent job, arriving by ferry the day before he and several others headed to west Cork to buy the trawler, was to act as a deckhand on the trawler while Lapa, the Ukrainian, would be its pilot.

The crew of the MV Matthew on deck passing Cobh flanked by the Army Ranger Wing.Alamy.

Habron and Lapa met up and headed south to purchase the trawler with two gang members from Newry and a third man. He is a Scottish national who was a senior Kinahan operator who flew in, with the money, from Dubai. The two people from Newry and the man from Scotland remain at large.

As they moved towards Castletownbere they could not have known that an elite team from the Garda National Surveillance Unit was following close behind.

‘Spare parts’

The crew of the Matthew were told the drugs on board were ‘spare parts’ – but they told gardaí in interviews, after their arrest, that the men who came to load the cargo at sea off Venezuela were heavily armed.

To quell their suspicions the Iranian captain Soheil Jelveh (51) offered them a bonus to keep quiet. Jelveh would claim to gardaí that Cumali Ozgen, a Dutch national with connections to Iran, was running the operation.

Regardless, both men have now been sentenced and face spells in Irish prisons.

In court it was said that Ozgen was a cleaner, but he was in accommodation on the Matthew that is known as the pilot’s cabin – the equivalent of a VIP room and right next to the bridge.

Gardaí believe that he was the man onboard to monitor proceedings. In court, his defence team admitted he was there to be the “eyes and ears” of those directing the operation from Dubai, and had no seafaring experience.

He took the job, the court was told, in a “misguided attempt” to provide for his family.

Tracking the operation

Key to the whole operation was the information that tipped the Irish off to what was going on. This came from analysts at the EU- and UK-funded MAOC-N agency in Portugal along with other high level intelligence sharing.

That intelligence is a mix of profiling ships, monitoring communications and high level sharing of data between agencies across the globe with Irish partners.

Gardaí from the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, led by Detective Superintendent Keith Halley, began the endgame operation armed with the European agency’s intelligence.

It was thought first that the drugs would be landed on the east coast near Wicklow and Wexford and the guards deployed specialist units there near Kilmore Quay. What followed was a far more dramatic operation as the ship was stormed and brought to harbour in Cork.

Those on board the MV Matthew knew the game was up long before the first boots of the Army Ranger Wing landed on their deck. The Castlemore ran aground off Wexford, en route to Castletownbere, and Habron and Lapa had to be winched to safety.

Panicked messages appeared in the Signal and Whatsapp groups. Those messaging began to contemplate putting the drugs in a lifeboat and sailing it to Ireland. They also thought about getting criminals in Dublin to come out and meet them.

A long-back-and forth between Irish authorities and the ship’s radio then ensued before the order was ultimately given to raid the vessel, following a sign-off from then-Tánaiste and Defence Minister Micheál Martin.

The crew of the Matthew sentenced today were relative bit players – just pawns in a much bigger global level enterprise of terror group fundraising and drug cartels. They were Iranian Saied Hassani (39), Filipino Harold Estoesta (31), Ukrainian Mykhailo Gavryk (32), Ukrainian Vitalit Vlasoi (32), Iranian ship’s captain Soheil Jelveh (51) and Dutchman Cumali Ozgen (49)

Other crew members on board, deemed to have no involvement with the smuggling operation, were not prosecuted.

Sources have said that gardaí and other law enforcement agencies are not finished – they still must arrest the other organisers, including those aligned to the Kinahan OCG.

Routes have diversified but sources said that Dutch and Iranian gangsters are now running the shipments across the Atlantic either towards Rotterdam, the Irish and Cornwall coast or to Cape Verde and Senegal.

As one Irish security source put it: “We need another few Matthews and that might help to stop it.”

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Niall O’Connor

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