Four business executives linked to the spyware developer Intellexa have been convicted by a Greek court for their involvement in the illegal wiretapping of government ministers, military officials, and journalists.
The convicted executives included Tal Dilian, the founder of Intellexa and a former commander of an elite Israeli intelligence unit; his ex-wife and business partner Sara Hamou; Intellexa executive Felix Bitzios; and Yiannis Lavranos, who owned the Greek security firm that purchased Intellexa’s Predator spyware.
The court sentenced each defendant to serve eight years in prison, suspended pending appeals. The four executives were convicted of “breaching the confidentiality of telephone communications,” the presiding judge said, as well as illegally accessing information systems.
In 2023, as part of the Cyprus Confidential investigation, ICIJ reported on Intellexa’s sale of spyware to some of the world’s most brutal regimes. Hamou, a corporate offshoring specialist, played a key role in establishing a base of operations for the company in Cyprus. Dilian, Hamou, and Bitzios were sanctioned by the U.S. government in March and September 2024, but sanctions were lifted on Hamou in late 2025.
The U.S. sanctions did not stop Intellexa. In May 2024, after the sanctions were imposed, its Predator spyware — a piece of software that allows covert access to a mobile device’s microphone, camera, contacts and files — was used to hack the phone of a prominent Angolan journalist, Teixeira Cândido.
“I was scared, of course, because I didn’t know what content they took from my phone, from my emails, and I didn’t know what they had listened to,” Cândido told ICIJ. “It feels like you’re walking naked and being watched.”
Cândido has been an outspoken advocate for media freedom in a country where journalists frequently face harassment and intimidation from authorities. He told ICIJ that he became increasingly concerned about digital surveillance after a burglary at the headquarters of the Syndicate of Angolan Journalists, which he headed until 2024, where computers were stolen. He then approached Amnesty International’s Security Lab, which discovered the Predator spyware.
Amnesty also discovered that Predator software targeted a human rights lawyer in Pakistan in summer 2025. Several business executives linked to Intellexa have also established businesses based in Portugal — including a skincare company founded by Hamou.
The Greek case stems from a 2022 scandal in the country, dubbed Predatorgate, in which Intellexa’s spyware was used to target the phones of 87 prominent individuals. Those targeted included the current leader of the main opposition party, a journalist who covered corruption in the Greek banking sector, and the editor of the country’s top newspaper. The head of Greece’s intelligence agency and a senior aide to the prime minister were forced to resign in the wake of the revelations.
The convictions may also lead to further prosecutions against those who played a role in the phone hacking scandal. According to the Greek daily Kathimerini, the court agreed to share the record of the trial with judicial authorities to investigate potential additional offenses by the four defendants and others. The prosecutor in the case said the evidence warranted an investigation into whether espionage charges should be brought in the future.
Intellexa’s clients have included some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, including Sudan’s powerful Rapid Support Forces, whose actions in the ongoing civil war have been described by U.N. experts as bearing the “hallmarks of genocide.” It has also sold Predator to the Egyptian intelligence services and the Vietnamese government, which attempted to hack the devices of U.S. officials.
“This is the first time that an executive at a mercenary spy company has been convicted and sentenced to prison,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “What this shows is when all the facts of spyware companies’ business models get in front of a fair judge, consequences will follow.”
