Meet ‘Posh George’: The Shady Money Man Tangled Up With Brexit, Russia, and Trump
Why did Nigel Farage take a dark web fraudster to the Republican convention? And what did this young money-laundering maven tell the feds when they busted him?
LONDON—When Nigel Farage, Mr. Brexit, watched Donald Trump accept the Republican Party’s presidential nomination at the convention last year he had an extremely unlikely companion. His closest aide on the trip was an offshore investment expert who had boasted on the dark web about his ability to launder money illegally in and out of the United States.
The aide, George Cottrell, was busted at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on his way home to London on July 22, 2016. He would later plead guilty to participating in a scheme “to advertise money laundering services on a TOR network black-market website.”
With questions being raised about a dark money influence on Brexit—and the election of Donald Trump—all of this begs the question: who was this criminal operative chosen to accompany Farage at the RNC where he met with some of Trump’s best known boosters, including Newt Gingrich and Roger Stone?
As well as Cottrell’s advertised ability to transmit money across borders without detection, he was well versed in the world of offshore and cross-border banking. Despite having no political experience, this was the man—aged just 22 at the time—Farage chose to run his office at the height of the battle for Brexit. He was also the co-director of Brexit fundraising for UKIP.
Cottrell is young to have developed such knowledge of international finance, but then again he was first registered as the director of a business, Upsilon Investments six years ago while he was still a high school-aged kid —alongside an offshore director based in the British Virgin Islands—according to records lodged with Companies House in London.
Before entering his guilty plea, Cottrell changed his name to George Cotrel. He told the U.S. authorities this was intended to “distance his previous involvement in certain political activities.” It didn’t work.
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Some of those who saw him running around for Farage while working at the pro-Brexit party thought of Cottrell as a “swashbuckler”—a player who remained popular in Farage’s clique not least because he was known to be extremely generous at the bar.
Others say he was a serious operator. “He was a very smart cookie, very clever chap. When I was campaigning with him, he was erudite and had all the attributes going for him,” said Nigel Sussman, the commercial director of the pro-Moscow group Westminster Russia Forum and a former UKIP candidate.
“He was very well connected,” Sussman told The Daily Beast.
Cottrell had worked for a number of banks, including a most recent role helping high net worth individuals shift their money across borders. He also claims he had been working as a consultant in the financial intelligence unit of an intelligence agency for over a year when he joined UKIP—in a senior role that he undertook for free. “I don’t think he was ever paid a bean by the party, not a single bean,” said a party official.
A UKIP insider said he was remarkably effective and knowledgeable for his age. “He’s entirely personable, entirely likeable, a great fun figure and very impressive getting things done,” he said. “He brought us skills of immense chutzpah and phenomenal self-confidence.”
Known as “Posh George” by Farage and his entourage, Cottrell is the nephew of Lord Hesketh, a former Conservative party treasurer who later defected to the more radical right-wing UKIP. His mother, Fiona Cottrell, was reportedly a former girlfriend of Prince Charles.
After Cottrell was released from federal prison in the U.S., former UKIP candidate and party supporter William Cash wrote a sympathetic profile for The Daily Telegraph. As part of a detailed interview, it offered an account of how Cottrell got mixed up in dark web fraud that was radically different from the sworn testimony he gave in court. The article claimed he was approached at his bank by two American businessmen who wanted to sell their property portfolio. His guilty plea, by contrast, admitted that he had offered illicit money laundering services on a TOR site.
While the interview seemed keen to paint a more understanding picture of Cottrell—a young man who got into trouble after struggling with gambling—it does also fill in some of the questions around why Cottrell would prove useful to Farage. It was apparently not just his family connections that secured his job; he was said to have “learned about the murky and complicated world of `shadow banking,’, secret offshore accounts and sophisticated financial structures” while he worked at a private bank.
“It was these skills that landed Cottrell an unpaid role” at UKIP according to Cash, who explained that Cottrell went on to work “for an offshore private bank (which was under investigation by the U.S. authorities as a `foreign financial institution of primary money-laundering concern’).”
A LinkedIn page in Cottrell’s name is careful not to name all of the banks he has worked for. Instead it talks about working for a private bank as a “Client Manager within cross-border private banking division, responsible for onboarding HNWI individuals,” or as an “advisor to the Investment Manager of a Cayman administered fund of funds.”
The LinkedIn account is less secretive about his “interests.” The 41 organizations listed on the profile include Cottrell’s old school and some of the global financial powerhouses you would expect to see on the account of any financier, but there are also some more unusual connections.
Cottrell is listed as one of just 71 followers of Moldinconbank, a controversial Moldovan bank that was alleged to be at the very center of the “Russian Laundromat” scam that laundered billions in illicit funds from Moscow through fraud, rigged state contracts and tax evasion. Some of those laundered state funds reportedly went to pay foreigners who were acting on behalf of the Kremlin, such as the leader of a small Polish political party who was later arrested on charges of spying for Russia.
The Daily Beast asked the bank whether Cottrell had ever worked with them, but the HR department would only say: “According to the legislation in force, personal data is granted only with the agreement of the employee.”
Another of the Cottrell account’s “interests” is the bank FBME, an entity which was officially based in Tanzania but had foreign offices in two countries: Cyprus and Russia. According to a U.S. investigation the bank was linked to Bashar al Assad and al Qaeda as well as a $230m fraud against the Russian people uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, which led to a series of anti-corruption laws being introduced around the world in his name. In 2014, the bank was banned from accessing the American market by the U.S. Treasury after money laundering allegations.
The Daily Beast cannot independently verify that this LinkedIn page was written by Cottrell but a UKIP spokesman confirmed that the entry about his role in the party was accurate. The LinkedIn account is also linked—from and to—a Twitter account in Cottrell’s name, which has 140 followers. Those followers include a host of UKIP or Brexit campaign insiders including Joe Jenkins, Jack Montgomery, Michael Heaver, Jack Duffin, Andy Wigmore and Nigel Farage as well as Farage’s head of press Dan Jukes and UKIP comms chief Gawain Towler. Towler tagged the account after a night out with Cottrell and his old UKIP buddies “making up” in East London after his deportation from the U.S. earlier this year. A UKIP spokesman said he believed that the account was genuine.
Another follower of the @GeorgeSCottrell account is Ben Harris-Quinney, chairman of the Bow Group—Britain’s oldest conservative think tank.
He told The Daily Beast he had only met Cottrell a handful of times but he described a man who made a big impression in a world where most senior party apparatchiks are a fairly uninspiring. “He’s quite a larger than life, engaging character. I got the impression that he was a bit of a swashbuckler—keen on adventure,” he said.
Harris-Quinney caught up with him in the pub after his release. “People were very surprised when he was arrested because it was so bizarre,” he said. “But he seemed in good spirits and appeared to have taken the whole thing in his stride.”
Indeed, as Cottrell told The Telegraph: “Despite my unfortunate adventure, and everything I went through, I still maintain 2016 was the best year of my life… Brexit and Trump. Nothing better.”
Also on his small list of followers is the journalist Isabel Oakeshott who was with Cottrell and Farage when the young aide was arrested by U.S. agents in Chicago.
At the time, she was writing the book Bad Boys of Brexit, nominally authored by Arron Banks, which names Cottrell as one of just four UKIP staffers in the book’s “cast of characters.”
Banks was by far the biggest financial backer of Brexit—first donating to UKIP and then donating and lending millions to Leave.EU, and another Brexit campaign group. Last month, it was announced that Britain’s Electoral Commission was launching an investigation into whether or not Banks was the “true source” of that money.
Two weeks earlier Open Democracy UK published an investigation into Banks’ finances—raising questions over his wealth and claiming he had been in some financial difficulty before finding almost £10 million to put towards securing Britain’s exit from the European Union. “The self-styled ‘bad boy’ who bankrolled the Leave campaign appears to have exaggerated his wealth. So how did he pay for his Brexit spree?” the report asked.
Banks—who was a member of Farage’s small Brexit inner circle, along with Cottrell—is a colorful character who seems to enjoy fanning the rumors that surround him including suggestions that he has been working on behalf of the Russians.
The week before Christmas this year, Banks and Andy Wigmore, a colleague from Leave.EU, sent a journalist a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka with the message “From Russia With Love.”
In his account of the battle to secure Brexit, he delights in bringing up the spy scandal his Russian wife was caught up in in 2010. Ekaterina Paderina, the daughter of a senior Russian official, who speaks six languages, used an email address with 007 in it and drives the Banks’ family Range Rover with the number plate X MI5 SPY. Banks, who runs a private intelligence company, even details in his book a six-hour lunch at the Russian embassy with Farage, his wife and the Russian ambassador.
In his book, he describes Cottrell as “posh to the point of caricature and willfully abrasive,” as well as detailing the fact that it was Cottrell who accompanied Farage as he made his way from meeting to meeting at the RNC.
Banks also describes the moment Cottrell was apprehended at the airport in Chicago in July 2016:
“Five FBI officers cuffed him. They swooped the minute he set foot on the gangway… It was swift and discreet, and he was hauled off without explanation. Nigel was stunned… [Cottrell] was wealthy enough to give his time for nothing, and had proven hard-working and loyal. There was nothing to suggest any criminal connection.”
Two days later, Farage and Banks found out why Cottrell had been led away: “Nasty shock today as Nigel got Posh George’s full rap sheet. It’s not pretty.”
What looked like a maximum of 20 years in jail was ultimately reduced to eight months when Cottrell agreed to plead guilty on December 19, 2016.
Officials in the U.S., however, downplayed suggestions that Cottrell had flipped and given key information that might implicate any of his political colleagues as the FBI hunts for a dark money trail connecting Russia, Brexit and the Trump campaign. They said Cottrell would not have been given the lighter sentence and allowed to leave the U.S. if prosecutors were relying on him to give evidence in court.
In the Telegraph interview by a friendly UKIP activist, Cottrell claims that he was lured into the trap while offering to help a customer of his bank. That is entirely inconsistent with the guilty plea he entered in a federal courtroom in Arizona.
His signed declaration said he was snared by undercover IRS-CI agents after proactively offering to help criminals move large sums of money around the world without detection.
“I worked with another individual known as ‘Banker’ to advertise money laundering services on a TOR network black-market website,” he wrote. “I explained various ways criminal proceeds could be laundered—for example, methods to transfer large amounts of cash out of the United States without triggering reporting requirements.”
After his dark web ad attracted the attention of the authorities in March 2014—before he worked for UKIP—Cottrell corresponded with undercover operatives who were posing as drug dealers via the encrypted messaging service Cryptocat before agreeing to travel to Las Vegas to tie up the phony deal.
The federal court heard that Cottrell was extremely well-versed in the intricacies of moving money around. “Cotrel [sic] was surprisingly young—approximately twenty years old at the time—but the IRS-CI agents were impressed with his knowledge of finance, U.S. government procedures, and anti-money laundering laws.”
The question remains, how much of that knowledge was he employing as UKIP’s chief Brexit fundraiser?
For yet more interesting articles, many in a similar revealing vein CLICK HERE
well I guess that is around 5 > 8,000 articles before you start following all the other links 😉
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‘IF it looks like a duck & it walks like a duck and it sounds like a duck, it most probably is a duck …’
Corruption is remarcably hard to prove as the corrupt are the most effective witnesses – often the only witnesses – one is well advised to consider the context, study the motivation and follow the money … Then and only then ‘IF it looks like corruption etc. …’
Trump, Assange, Bannon, Farage… bound together in an unholy alliance
The Wikileaks founder’s astonishing admission should prompt MPs finally to start asking questions
Julian Assange was asked by Cambridge Analytica if he wanted ‘help’ with Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
Last Wednesday, 11 months into Donald Trump’s new world order, in the first year of normalisation, a sudden unblurring of lines took place. A shift. A door of perception swung open.
Because that was the day that the dramatis personae of two separate Trump-Russia scandals smashed headlong into one another. A high-speed news car crash between Cambridge Analytica and Wikileaks, the two organisations that arguably had the most impact on 2016, coming together last week in one head-spinning scoop.
That day, we learned that Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data firm that helped Trump to power, had contacted Julian Assange to ask him if he wanted “help” with Wikileaks’s stash of stolen emails.
That’s the stash of stolen emails that had such a devastating impact on Hillary Clinton in the last months of the campaign. And this story brought Wikileaks, which the head of the CIA describes as a “hostile intelligence service”, directly together with the Trump campaign for which Cambridge Analytica worked. This is an amazing plot twist for the company, owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, which is already the subject of investigations by the House intelligence committee, the Senate intelligence committee, the FBI and, it was announced late on Friday night, the Senate judiciary committee.
So far, so American. These are US scandals involving US politics and the news made the headlines in US bulletins across US networks.
But it’s also Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company, which has its headquarters in central London and that, following a series of articles about its role in Brexit in the Guardian and the Observer, is also being investigated, by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office. The company that was spun out of a British military contractor, is headed by an old Etonian and that responded to our stories earlier this year by threatening to sue us. It’s our Cambridge it’s named after, not the American one, and it was here that it processed the voter files of 240 million US citizens.
It’s also here that this “hostile intelligence service” – Wikileaks – is based. The Ecuadorian embassy is just a few miles, as the crow flies, from Cambridge Analytica’s head office. Because this is not just about America. It’s about Britain, too. This is transatlantic. It’s not possible to separate Britain and the US in this whole sorry mess – and I say this as someone who has spent months trying. Where we see this most clearly is in that other weird Wikileaks connection: Nigel Farage. Because that moment in March when Farage was caught tripping down the steps of the Ecuadorian embassy was the last moment the lines suddenly became visible. That the ideological overlaps between Wikileaks and Trump and Brexit were revealed to be not just lines, but a channel of communication.
‘Nigel Farage, who visited Donald Trump and then Julian Assange.’ Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock
Because if there’s one person who’s in the middle of all of this, but who has escaped any proper scrutiny, it’s Nigel Farage. That’s Nigel Farage, who led the Leave.EU campaign, which is being investigated by the Electoral Commission alongside Cambridge Analytica, about whether the latter made an “impermissible donation” of services to the Leave campaign. Nigel Farage who visited Donald Trump and then Julian Assange. Who is friends with Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. Who headed an organisation – Ukip – which has multiple, public, visible but almost entirely unreported Russian connections. Who is paid by the Russian state via the broadcaster RT, which was banned last week from Twitter. And who appears like clockwork on British television without any word of this.
This is a power network that involves Wikileaks and Farage, and Cambridge Analytica and Farage, and Robert Mercer and Farage. Steve Bannon, former vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and Farage. It’s Nigel Farage and Brexit and Trump and Cambridge Analytica and Wikileaks… and, if the Senate intelligence committee and the House intelligence committee and the FBI are on to anything at all, somewhere in the middle of all that, Russia.
Try to follow this on a daily basis and it’s one long headspin: a spider’s web of relationships and networks of power and patronage and alliances that spans the Atlantic and embraces data firms, thinktanks and media outlets. It is about complicated corporate structures in obscure jurisdictions, involving offshore funds funnelled through the black-box algorithms of the platform tech monopolists. That it’s eye-wateringly complicated and geographically diffuse is not a coincidence. Confusion is the charlatan’s friend, noise its accessory. The babble on Twitter is a convenient cloak of darkness.
Yet it’s also quite simple. In a well-functioning democracy, a well-functioning press and a well-functioning parliament would help a well-functioning judiciary do its job. Britain is not that country. There is a vacuum where questions should be, the committees, the inquiries, the headlines on the TV bulletins. What was Nigel Farage doing in the Ecuadorian embassy? More to the point: why has no public official asked him? Why is he giving speeches – for money – in the US? Who’s paying him? I know this because my weirdest new hobby of 2017 is to harry Arron Banks, the Bristol businessman who was Ukip and Leave.EU’s main funder, and Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s comms man and Belize’s trade attache to the US, across the internet late at night. Wigmore told me about this new US venture – an offshore-based political consultancy working on Steve Bannon-related projects – in a series of tweets. Is it true? Who knows? Leave.EU has learned from its Trumpian friends that black is white and white is black and these half-facts are a convenient way of diffusing scandal and obscuring truth.
(You got this? Farage visited Trump, then Assange, then Rohrabacher. Rohrabacher met Don Trump’s Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Then Assange. And is now trying to close the circle with Trump.)
In these post-truth times, journalists are fighting the equivalent of a firestorm with a bottle of water and a wet hankie. We desperately need help. We need public pressure. We need parliament to step up and start asking proper questions. There may be innocent answers to all these questions. Let’s please just ask them.
I try to make every effort to NOT infringe copyrights in any commercial way & make all corrections of fact brought to my attention by an identifiable individual
one wonders if the source of the article below, florid as its language might be, is right this time it has proved accurate in the past. Other sources have already shown the veracity of my articles regarding Arron Banks and the coverage of George Cantrell were correct and there are sound grounds for believing Farage is in danger of arrest by American authorities – those who follow the facts will have noted he has been dropped by Trump since he was elected, even to the extent of withdrawing his invitation to the Inauguration at a time when Trump’s version of ‘Comical Ali’ was desperate to increase numbers to make his lies in the Press Office seem plausible, which they were not!
Trump And Farage – Shit Hits Fan
Last week, I noted that Combover Crybaby Donald Trump, the embattled yet still nominally sitting President of the USA, had effectively thrown former UKIP Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage under the bus. Any unwanted fallout from Mr Thirsty’s visit to the Ecuadorian embassy would have to be carried by the man Wot Did It. Now, although Farage has not yet acknowledged the fact, matter have got rather more serious.
Next one with bars, eh?
It was The Donald’s least favoured network CNN that told the world how serious. “A federal grand jury in Washington on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter … The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are”. The investigation concerns Trump, his gang, and Russia.
There was more. “Mueller’s team has also examined foreign lobbying conducted by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and others. His team has issued subpoenas for documents and testimony to a handful of figures, including some people close to Manafort, and others involved in the Trump Tower meeting between Russians and campaign officials”. Manafort is close to Farage.
Moreover, Manafort had his home raided by the FBI in August, under what is known as a “no knock” warrant – the Feds just marched in and seized what they wanted. Manafort was given no notice because of a perceived fear that he would destroy evidence.
So what does this mean for all those from the UK who courted Trump so assiduously? Well, that very much depends on what form the courting took. Anything looking like collusion, conspiracy, dabbling in dodgy material, and certainly anything to do with the influencing of the democratic process would put any or all of those people well beyond the mouth of Shit Creek without recourse to any hand-held marine propulsion device.
After CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz broke the news, those consequences were explained by Renato Mariotti, who is not merely some amateur Twitter pundit, but a former Federal prosecutor. Readers are advised to pay good heed to his words here.
“To approve an indictment, grand jurors must find there is enough evidence to show there’s good reason to believe the crime was committed … But federal prosecutors don’t present indictments unless they believe they can prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt at trial … Generally prosecutors wait until the end of the investigation to present indictments, so they have all of the evidence beforehand … Sometimes prosecutors will indict someone earlier if they hit a ‘wall’ and want to get someone to flip”.
Who might they have in mind? “Given Mueller’s ongoing interviews of White House staff, it doesn’t appear that his investigation is wrapping up soon … So this suggests to me that he most likely is indicting someone early to get him/her to flip. The obvious candidate is Paul Manafort”. There is also the consideration that Mueller may want to get his foot in the door before Trump tries to fire him. We’ll get on to that part later.
Behold a headless chicken
All of that is bad, but for Farage, there is worse. Information arrived on Zelo Street last week concerning someone whom the investigators may want to flip. The name in the frame was not Paul Manafort. It was someone even closer to Nigel Farage. That ties up with Mariotti’s analysis (for reasons of not wanting to frighten the horses, the name will not be pitched here – yet).
And for anyone still not convinced that this is serious for all within the Trump orbit, all you need is to look at the headless chicken display coming out of Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) right now. All semblance of news presentation and grounding the narrative in reality has been abandoned in favour of turning the network into Trump TV.
Don’t panic, Mr Murdoch!
So FNC is running knocking copy on Mueller, signalling panic – and opening the door to nudging a highly susceptible President into sacking the Special Prosecutor. Viewers were urged to look anywhere else but at the prospect of their hero going the same way as Richard Milhous Nixon – except in rather less time.
Professional loudmouth Sean Hannity was on the case as soon as CNN broke the Mueller story. “When will @HillaryClinton be indicted?” Panic indeed. And there was more. “This has been a HORRIBLE week for Mueller, Special Counsel’s office. THIS IS ALL A DISTRACTION. Monday I’ll have the details. TICK TOCK….!”. Drink that Kool-Aid!
It won’t work. And in bad news for the Murdoch mafiosi – remember, Rupert Murdoch is now in personal change of FNC – Media Matters for America is on the case. The attempts by FNC to talk up a “Hillary Clinton uranium story” – one with the paw prints of FNC host Hannity and his Breitbart counterpart Steve Bannon all over it – are not credible. It’s panic propagandising. The shit has well and truly hit the fan.
So should Farage and his pals steer clear of their trips to the USA? But you know the answer to that: Mr Thirsty and his closest comrades believe they’re untouchable. So sit back, get the popcorn in – and wait to see who gets flipped first.
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Only one major pro-Leave donor refuses to distance himself from controversial £435,000, which bankrolled DUP’s Brexit spending spree.
Richard Cook, chair of the secretive group that channelled £435,000 to the DUP, is interviewed at his home by Channel 4’s Alex Thomson. Image used under Fair Use: Channel 4. All rights reserved.A number of major political donors have denied they are the source of a controversial £435,000 donation to the DUP’s Brexit campaign, openDemocracy can reveal today – with only one person refusing to distance themself from the secret donation.
openDemocracy has investigated a list of key figures in relation to the donation, and all apart from one have either denied involvement or have made public statements indicating opposition to Brexit. The only person we contacted who has told us he will not comment is Henry Angest, a banker and longstanding Conservative party donor, who is known to be a supporter of Brexit.
Continuing secrecy raises pressing questions about transparency in UK politics.
There is no evidence to suggest that Angest, nor any of the other figures we have contacted, are the source of the £435,000. Nor is there any suggestion that whoever gave this unprecedented sum to the DUP’s Leave campaign broke any laws.
But the continuing secrecy raises pressing questions about transparency in UK politics – particularly as Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party now holds the balance of power in parliament, propping up Theresa May’s minority government as it negotiates Brexit.
The UK government announced earlier this year that it will change the law to end donor secrecy in Northern Ireland, but has rejected calls to backdate the law to 2014, so that the source of the DUP donation could be revealed. Government and DUP sources have rejected accusations that this is ‘protection’ for the DUP, as part of their £1 billion deal to keep the Conservatives in power.
One consistent clue
Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has repeatedly refused to reveal the source of the cash, which was spent on lavish pro-Leave campaigning in the weeks before Brexit. But we have consistently been given one clue as to where the money came from: that those behind the donation are passionate supporters of the Union between the four nations of the UK.
After openDemocracy first revealed the scale of the secret donation, DUP leader Arlene Foster was grilled about it on the BBC Northern Ireland show ‘The View’. She said that the money came from “an organisation in England that wants to see the Union kept”. Later that month, under continued pressure, her party disclosed that the money came from “pro-Union business people”, via a little-known group called the Constitutional Research Council (CRC). Glasgow-based Richard Cook, who chairs the CRC, has claimed that the group was set up to promote the Union, and has also revealed that Scottish people are among the donors.
openDemocracy has since investigated every major political donor who fits this profile. In particular, we contacted everyone who gave £25,000 or more to oppose independence in the run-up to the 2014 Scottish referendum, and asked each donor from that group (apart from those already on record as Remain supporters) if they were the source of the DUP donation.
The findings of our investigation are below.
Ruling out Remainers
‘Vote to Leave the EU’. Flickr/David Holt. CC-by-2.0.In February, we discovered that the £435,000 had been channelled to the DUP via a little-known group, the Constitutional Research Council (CRC). The DUP Brexit campaign manager Jeffrey Donaldson MP has described the CRC as “a group which supports constitutional pro-Union causes”. He added: “they believed, as did we, that Brexit would be good for the Union and bad for those who oppose it.”
Our first step was to eliminate from our enquiries all the pro-Union donors who have also – vocally or financially – supported the Remain campaign. These include Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who gave a million pounds to the pro-Union Scottish campaign, Better Together, and has also spoken repeatedly in public about her support for EU membership. Donald Houston, whose firm Raindance Investments Ltd gave £200,000 to the pro-Union campaign in 2014, also contributed to the Remain campaign. The billionaire banker Bruno Schroder made significant donations to Better Together, the Remain campaign, and the Kensington Conservative party.
Ian Taylor’s company Vitol, the world’s largest oil trader, was fined $7 million in 2007 for paying $13 million in kickbacks to Iraqi officials during the Saddam Hussein era. Taylor is also the majority shareholder in Harris Tweed Hebrides and chairman of the board of the Royal Opera House. He was a major donor to Better Together before the Scottish independence referendum, and also to the Remain campaign in 2016.
Orion Engineering is also an important player in Scotland’s oil industry, led by Alan Savage. The firm, which specialises in recruitment, gave £50,000 to Better Together ahead of the Scottish referendum. The firm has not responded to our attempts to contact Savage, but given that the firm has also supported the Liberal Democrats (opponents of Brexit), and in 2015 Savage wrote that “being part of the European Union is fundamental to my business”, and that “leaving the EU is a completely absurd idea”, we have ruled him out of our enquiries.
“Mr Sansom knows nothing about this shower”
Next, there were those pro-Union donors who told us that they supported the Remain campaign, or vocally distanced themselves from the DUP deal.
Author Christopher Sansom is reported on the Electoral Commission website as having given £200,000 to Better Together (though The Scotsman has previously put the figure at £294,000). Speaking to openDemocracy via his agent, he confirmed that he “knows nothing about this shower”, and was a Remain supporter.
Conservative peer Andrew Fraser is reported on the Electoral Commission website as having given £100,000 to Better Together of which he was treasurer, and also gave £20,000 to the “Let’s Stay Together” campaign (again, this number has been reported in the Scotsman as being higher). He was ennobled in David Cameron’s resignation honours, and, when asked by openDemocracy if he supported a Remain vote said, “I certainly did”.
The Scottish businessman Alan McFarlane, who is chairman of the advisory board of the think tank “Reform Scotland” and founder and senior partner of Edinburgh based investment management company Dundas Partners LLP, gave £20,000 to the Unionist “Vote No Borders” campaign, and also £10,000 to the “WSF2014 Ltd” pro-union campaign. Asked about the Constitutional Research Council, he told openDemocracy “I know nothing about them”, and sources confirmed that he was a Remain supporter.
Angus MacDonald, who made his fortune in the financial information industry and now works in recycling in Scotland, ran his own pro-Union campaign in 2014. He confirmed that he had “no idea about any of this”. The Constitutional Research Council chair Richard Cook also works in the waste management industry in Scotland, but MacDonald said he had “never heard of Richard Cook.”
The Earl of Seafield is the chieftain of Clan Grant and one of Scotland’s biggest landowners. It was the previous Earl of Seafield who, as Scotland’s Chancellor, signed the Act of the Union in 1707, famously saying, “there’s ane end of ane auld sang”. The current Earl made a donation of £100,000 under the name “Sir Ian Seafield” to the Better Together campaign, while his Reidhaven Trust Estate Ltd made a further donation of £20,000. Asked about the DUP donation, his spokesperson confirmed that “Lord Seafield does indeed know nothing about this”.
Banker Ivor Dunbar, former co-head of global capital markets at Deutsche Bank, gave £50,000 to Better Together in 2012. Dunbar is chairman of the Scottish based gap-year charity Project Trust, and has told openDemocracy he knows “nothing about the matters to which you refer”.
Jimmy Milne is chairman and managing director of the Balmoral Group, a major player in the Scottish oil industry. His firm gave £58,000 to Better Together, but his spokesperson also confirmed that “he has no knowledge of the CRC or Richard Cook so is unable to assist with your enquiry”.
The Buccleuch Estates Limited, the company owned by the Duke of Buccleuch, gave a total of £55,724 to various pro-Union campaigns ahead of Scotland’s referendum, but confirmed to openDemocracy that they know nothing about the £435,000 donation to the DUP.
Sir David Garrard, a major Labour donor and Better Together supporter to the value of £25,000, told us that “I can confirm that I have never given directly, or knowingly indirectly, a penny piece to the DUP”.
Sir Edward Percy Keswick Weatherall’s family fortune comes from its controlling share of the bank Jardine Matheson, which played a notable role in the 19th century Opium Wars, an episode of British history so bloody that it caused William Gladstone to say at the time that he lived “in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China”.
Weatherall made a donation of £50,000 to Better Together ahead of the vote in Scotland in 2014. He has told openDemocracy that he was not involved in any donation to the Constitutional Research Council, and has never heard of the organisation or of its chair, Richard Cook.
Mark Bamford, whose family firm owns the iconic heavy-machinery company JCB gave a £74,747.47 donation to a group called the Scottish Research Society ahead of the 2014 referendum. openDemocracy investigations have ascertained that The Scottish Research Society’s registered address was a flat in Edinburgh which belonged to Christopher Monckton, the former UKIP deputy leader and prominent climate change denier (and subject of previous openDemocracy investigations). However, Bamford responded to our queries saying “I am sorry I am unable to assist and any donations that may have been made are in the public domain.”
Malcolm Offord ran his own pro-Union campaign, named “Vote No Borders”, to which he personally donated £20,000, and which attracted a number of other substantial donations. Offord previously worked in the City, and moved back to Scotland to establish his own firm “Badenoch & Co”.
Badenoch’s office sits at the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town on the top floor of a building otherwise occupied by the firm Murray Capital, owned by the controversial former Rangers owner David Murray. Together, they face across Charlotte Square to Bute House, the official residence of the First Minister of Scotland.
In 2016, Offord spoke in favour of a Leave vote, and he is well connected with the Unionist, political and business worlds in Scotland. However, his office has told us that he knows nothing about the donation to the Constitutional Research Council and the DUP.
The Marquess of Salisbury and Stalbury trustees
Hatfield House. Imaged used under Fair Use: http://www.hatfield-house.co.uk/. All rights reserved.Stalbury Trustees, who gave to Better Together, are regular donors to the Conservative party. Their trustees include the Marquess of Salisbury, a former leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords who is known to have supported a Leave vote. Salisbury has long taken an interest in Northern Irish Unionism, and, in 2010, hosted talks between the Conservatives and Northern Irish Unionist parties, including prominent DUP figures, at his home, Hatfield House, in Hertfordshire.
The Marquess of Salisbury is also a donor to the think tank Open Europe. As openDemocracy has previously revealed, one Open Europe former staff member, Christopher Howarth, is now responsible for the European Research Group – the secretive pro-Brexit MP group which received funding from the Constitutional Research Council when it was chaired by the now Brexit minister, Steve Baker. Another former Open Europe staffer, Raoul Ruparel, now works as a Special Adviser in the Department for Exiting the EU alongside Steve Baker, the former ERG chair.
‘No one involved with Stalbury is aware of the specific donation which you mention.’
openDemocracy wrote to Mr Ulric David Barnett, who is secretary of the trust (and lists his profession as “gentleman”). We received a phone call from the mailroom of a legal firm named Forsters, in Mayfair. The address belongs to them, and they initially claimed they knew no one of that name. However, we eventually managed to establish that the trust is, in fact, a client of the firm. After emailing and telephoning the relevant lawyer, we finally received this statement:
“I can tell you that Stalbury has made no donation to the Constitutional Research Council, nor, directly or indirectly, to the Democratic Unionist Party and no one involved with Stalbury is aware of the specific donation which you mention.”
The distillers William Grant and Sons, who produce whiskies including Glenfiddich and Balvenie, donated £135,000 to Better Together, and £25,000 each to the separate pro-Union campaigns “Vote No Borders”, run by the businessman Malcolm Offord, and £25,000 to the campaign run by the previously mentioned Angus MacDonald. After chasing up our letters to them, we received a phone call from Jack Irvine, CEO of Media House International, who told us that he had arranged the Better Together donation, and that “I can assure you there was no connection” between the company and the Constitutional Research Council or the DUP.
The Vestey family
There is one major Unionist donor who has not responded to our repeated attempts to contact him.
The Vestey family are heirs to a vast meat processing fortune, and one of their firms, Western United Investment Management Ltd, gave £40,000 to Better Together. Lord Samuel Vestey is Master of the Horse in the Royal household, and perhaps best known in the UK for the ‘horse meat scandal’, in which his firm supplied horse meat, labelled as beef, to a number of major outlets in 2013. In Australia, he is notorious for the more serious allegation that he used Aboriginal people as “virtual slaves”, leading to the iconic “Wave Hill Walk Off” in 1966 and remembered in the Australian protest song, “From little things, big things grow”. Both Vestey and his father served in the Scots Guards.
We have been unable to establish whether Lord Vestey took a firm public position on the EU referendum, but in an interview with Farmers’ Weekly in April this year he talked about how difficult Brexit would be for farmers, and worried about the shock to British voters as a result of what he called a “divorce settlement” – not language traditionally associated with Leave supporters.
The Vesteys have not responded to our repeated attempts to contact them.
Henry Angest and Arbuthnot Latham
There is one major donor to the Unionist cause in 2014 who is known to have supported Brexit, and who has refused to deny involvement in the DUP donation.
Sir Henry Angest, Chairman and Chief Executive of Arbuthnot Banking Group PLC. Image used under Fair Use: Arbuthnot Banking Group PLC. All rights reserved.Henry Angest is a Swiss-born banker with an estate in Bridge of Cally, Perthshire. He is chairman and chief executive of the private bank Arbuthnot Latham, owner of the firm Flowidea, and a former treasurer of the Conservative party. He has given over £1.9 million to the Conservative party and made headlines when he was given a knighthood by David Cameron, causing what the Daily Mail called a “cash for titles storm”. He made headlines again when, in 2013, it was revealed that Secure Trust Bank plc, of which he was chair, owned the controversial high-cost loans company Everyday Loans, which was reported to charge interest at an average of 74.8% APR. His bank sold the company in April 2016.
Angest’s firm Flowidea gave £100,000 to Better Together in 2014, and £10,000 to the “North East says No” campaign, against devolution to the North East of England, in 2004. His Arbuthnot Banking Group gave £20,000 to the Vote No campaign in the referendum on the Alternative Vote in 2011. In 2016 alone, Arbuthnott gave £68,500 to the Conservative party, Flowidea gave £185,000 and Angest himself gave £2,000 to the Perth and Kinross Conservatives.
Angest publicly backed Brexit, and, we are told, has long been involved in the Eurosceptic movement. Despite being a prolific donor to the causes he believes in, neither he, nor Flowidea, nor Arbuthnot, nor any of the 22 companies he is currently or has ever been a director of, are listed with the Electoral Commission as having registered any donations to any of the Leave campaigns in Great Britain.
However, investigations by The Observer in 2010 showed that he had given funds in 2006 to the Freedom Association – a right-wing group which has a number of ties to the Constitutional Research Council, through which the DUP donation was channelled. Steve Baker, the current Brexit minister, was a member of the Freedom Association until “around 2013”, the organisation told openDemocracy. Baker took a donation from the CRC in December 2016 for his work with the European Research Group. As openDemocracy has previously revealed, Richard Cook, CRC chair, has spoken at Freedom Association events, and was the Scottish representative of the Campaign Against Political Correctness – an organisation with very close links to the Freedom Association. In 2007, the two key DUP MPs, Jeffrey Donaldson and Sammy Wilson, were involved in a Freedom Association ‘fact-finding mission’ to Northern Ireland. Donaldson was the DUP’s Brexit campaign manager.
There is one major donor to the Unionist cause in 2014 who is known to have supported Brexit, and who has refused to deny involvement in the DUP donation.
Angest, like the Marquess of Salisbury, has also previously funded the group Open Europe, whose former staff members (as mentioned above) include Christopher Howarth, who now runs the CRC-funded European Research Group, and Raoul Ruparel, now a special adviser in the Department for Exiting the EU.
Finally, Mr Angest has also been a donor to the controversial organisation Atlantic Bridge, which brings together the British and the American neo-Conservative right and whose UK director was listed in 2009 as the Scottish businessman Adam Werritty, whose links to Liam Fox caused the latter to resign in disgrace as defence secretary in 2011.
Angest’s office eventually responded to our attempts to contact him, saying that they “have no comment on this matter”. We informed him that he was the only known Brexit-backer in our survey not to distance themselves from this donation, and asked again if he wanted to comment. His office didn’t reply.
We have no evidence to suggest that Henry Angest is the source of the DUP donation, and he is welcome to contact us to clarify the matter.
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‘Substantial’ fine linked to DUP’s secret Brexit donors
Former minister demands answers on £6,000 fine, questioning legality of DUP’s mystery source of Brexit cash
DUP leader Arlene Foster and UK prime minister Theresa May. Image, gov.uk, fair use.
A former Europe minister has today called for a “full and proper investigation” into a controversial £435,000 donation towards the DUP’s Brexit campaign, as new details emerge of a substantial fine linked to the transaction.
Theresa May’s allies in parliament, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), have always insisted that the donation, channelled via a secretive group known as the Constitutional Research Council (CRC), complied fully with the law.
However, openDemocracy has now learned that a £6,000 fine imposed by the Electoral Commission and paid in full last month was connected to the CRC. Labour MP Chris Bryant has written to the Northern Ireland Secretary, James Brokenshire, stating that it “cannot possibly be right” for details of one of the highest-ever fines imposed by the Electoral Commission to be kept secret.
“Failures by a regulated entity”
The Electoral Commission revealed on its website last month (as first spotted by The Detail) that it had imposed a £6,000 sanction connected to a political donation in Northern Ireland, but gave no name, offence, or summary of the decision. The Commission stated only that it imposed the penalty due to “failures by a regulated entity” but could not “disclose further information” because of legal restrictions.
Bryant has asked Brokenshire to confirm who the “regulated entity” is, and whether the fine relates to the unprecedented £435,000 donation given to Mrs May’s Westminster allies, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), in order to campaign for Brexit.
The £435,000 donation – a much larger sum than the DUP has ever spent on an electoral campaign in its history – attracted particular controversy because almost none of the cash was spent in Northern Ireland. Yet the donor secrecy laws which apply to Northern Ireland, and not the rest of the UK, have allowed the donors(s) to remain anonymous.
In his letter to the Northern Ireland Secretary, Bryant says of the Electoral Commission’s £6,000 fine:
“Whatever the rights and wrongs of maintaining secrecy about financial donations in Northern Ireland, it cannot possibly be right to keep secret the details of a regulated entity being found to have broken electoral law and being fined a substantial amount. No other judicial or quasi-judicial decision of this nature is kept secret in the UK.”
“No comment”
The Electoral Commission’s office in Belfast would make no comment on their own investigation nor on the casework that led to the high-level fine.
However, political sources in Northern Ireland with knowledge of the Commission’s affairs have confirmed to openDemocracy that the substantial sanction was connected to the Constitutional Research Council (CRC) – the secretive group that channelled the £435,000 to the DUP in Belfast.
The £6,000 fine was paid in full to the Commission on August 30.
openDemocracy contacted the CRC’s chair, Glasgow-based Richard Cook, and asked him to confirm details of the fine; why his organisation had been sanctioned by the Electoral Commission, and what part of Northern Ireland’s electoral law had been broken. He was also repeatedly asked why both he and the DUP had insisted no laws had been broken, and when he had learned that the Commission was investigating the cash transfer.
Throughout the conversation, Mr Cook was given multiple opportunities to dismiss the listed £6,000 fine as nothing to do with the Constitutional Research Council or the DUP. He declined to do so, or to make any further comment.
Although current electoral rules in Northern Ireland allow political parties to protect the identities of donors and funding, the government is expected to announce this will soon change.
However the UK government’s policy strategy on full transparency is likely to be highly influenced by their £1 billion deal with the DUP. The Conservative party’s minority government is being propped up in parliament by the DUP, and any change which exposed the DUP-CRC donation arrangement is likely to be resisted.
Rather than backdate transparency rules to 2014 – which would reveal the source of the £435,000 DUP cash – Brokenshire announced earlier this year that the change, which will be made through secondary legislation, would only apply to donations and loans received after 1st July 2017.
Government and DUP sources have denied that this is ‘protection’ for the DUP, as part of their deal to keep the Conservatives in power.
‘A full and proper investigation?’
Last month the Electoral Commission published details of a £3,500 fine on UKIP related to campaign expenditure.
In June, the Commission fined the owner of Butlin’s, Peter Harris, £12,000 for breaking spending return rules. Mr Harris spent £420,000 on the Leave campaign in last year’s EU referendum.
Also in June, the DUP were fined £4,000 for failure to complete campaign expenditure returns for the 2016 Assembly elections.
Bryant’s letter to Mr Brokenshire regarding the mystery £6,000 fine pointedly ends: “Does the fine relate to the DUP’s donation from the CRC? Will you launch a full and proper investigation into how the money was spent? And will you ensure that the truth comes to light?”
This is day two of openDemocracy’s week-long #BrexitDarkMoney series. See yesterday’s revelations here and our reasons for publishing this series here.
We need your help to expose the DUP
Theresa May is desperately clinging to power, relying on the DUP, the hard-right party that has blocked same-sex marriage, and kept abortion illegal.
Worse still, they’re bankrolled by dark money – we’ve exposed the shady group behind their lavish pro-Brexit campaigning, but they’re still refusing to name their secret donors. Now they hold the balance of power at Westminster, it’s even more vital that we find out who their paymasters are.
Can we return to Europe after Brexit?Since the referendum, opponents of Brexit have tried to prevent it. Now that it seems definite, for the first time Remain supporters debate how to reverse it once it has taken place. Join the discussion with Caroline Lucas MP, Clive Lewis MP, Anthony Barnett & Suzanne Moore moderated by John Harris. Tuesday 31 Oct 2017, 7.30 – 9.15, in London.
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The self-styled ‘bad boy’ who bankrolled the Leave campaign appears to have exaggerated his wealth. So how did he pay for his Brexit spree?
Arron Banks in 2014, when he pledged £1million to the UK Independence Party. Ben Birchall/PA Images. All rights reserved.
In September 2013, the man who bought Brexit – Arron Banks – was in trouble.
For the past two years, financial regulators in Gibraltar had been scrutinising his insurance under-writer, Southern Rock. They had discovered it was keeping reserves far below what was needed.
This was a serious problem. Banks claimed he had already provided £40 million to plug the hole. He also told the regulator he would step down as a director, but has since been required to find an eye-watering £60 million in extra funding.
A year later, these financial worries seem to have completely evaporated. Banks had begun buying diamond mines, investing millions into chemical companies and wealth management firms, setting up loss-making political consultancies, and most famous of all – funding the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).
One question remains though. If Banks was in such a tight spot in September 2013, how did he manage to be so generous the following year?
Over the past four months, openDemocracy has conducted an in-depth review of Bank’s business dealings since he first started out in business in the early 2000s. As well as his own public statements about the sources of his wealth, we have spoken to his former employers, and obtained and reviewed court documents. There are of course a number of perfectly innocent ways that Banks could have obtained the extra funds, but given Banks’ significance to British politics, what have found so far is extremely troubling.
“Quite good at persuading people to buy things they didn’t want to buy”
Banks had started out selling vacuum cleaner appliances door to door in Basingstoke in the late 1980s. “I was quite good at persuading people to buy things they didn’t want to buy,” he told the New Statesman in October 2016. He also briefly worked as an estate agent, and ran a failed bid to become a Conservative councillor. He married young and was soon the father of two daughters.
After leaving school with few qualifications, he had eventually found himself in a junior position in the Lloyds’ insurance market. This is where Banks gained his first exposure to the industry, where syndicates of insurers spread risks between themselves and traded financial assets to cover their positions. Banks spent seven years at Lloyds’, working his way into a junior underwriting position before he moved to Bristol, following a split from his first wife.
If Banks was in such a tight spot in September 2013, how did he manage to be so generous the following year?
It is here the cracks in Banks’ biography start to appear. Banks has claimed he was promoted and rose to lead his own sales team at Norwich Union – now part of Aviva. However, Aviva say they have no record of Banks ever having worked for Norwich Union. He has also claimed to have worked for Warren Buffett around this point in his career. We asked Buffett about this. He replied. “I have no memory of ever hearing of the name Arron Fraser Andrew Banks. He certainly never worked for me.” Further checks across the Berkshire Hathaway group, made by Buffett’s office, yielded no evidence he had ever worked for any of his subsidiaries. In a letter delivered by his lawyers, Banks declined to comment on either of these points.
In 1998, Banks got taken on by a tiny broker focussed on motorcycle insurance run from offices above a shop in the sleepy village of Thornbury. He was granted a 20% shareholding in the fledgling business. In November 2000, he resigned as a director of the firm, and two months later, sold his shares for £251,000.
Shortly afterwards, Banks met the woman who was to become his second wife, a Portsmouth-based Russian called Ekaterina Paderina. According to the Sunday Times, Paderina’s former husband had been interviewed twice by Special Branch because they suspected her of working for the Russian government. Ekaterina moved to join Banks in Bristol but stayed on the electoral roll in Portsmouth until 2008, still registered to a council flat overlooking the naval base. When Portsmouth Council found out she should not have been entitled to the flat because she was living with Banks, council officials reportedly demanded a cash payment be made by the Banks family in recompense.
Banks and Ekaterina wed in 2001 and in the autumn of that year Banks set up his own insurance company, with financial backing from his relatives and from the Northern Irish insurance tycoons, Leslie Hughes and James Bowers. The business focused on motorcycle, motorhome and van insurance.
The new businesses were also the first he formed with two men who would become his long term business partners, the Australian solicitor Jim Gannon and the accountant Paul Chase-Gardener.
In June this year, the Financial Times published their own analysis of the overlapping businesses of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”, and its editor Lionel Barber quite reasonably asked on Twitter: “but how rich is he really?”.
Banks fumed in a tweeted reply: “I founded and sold a listed insurance business for £145m! Not even mentioned – no FT, fake news.” That listed company was Brightside.
The amounts Banks has given to British politics are extraordinary.
The amount Banks made from the sale of Brightside is crucial to understanding whether Banks is really as rich as he says he is.
Company documents we have reviewed show Banks made £22 million from share sales, £1.2 million in salary from serving as the group’s CEO and Chief Insurance Officer, and just £270,000 in dividends.
So when Banks had told the Financial Times in 2015 he was worth £100 million, where did this valuation come from? More importantly, if he only made £22 million from Brightside share sales – where did all this cash for Brexit campaigning come from?
The amounts Banks has given to British politics are extraordinary. A total of £6 million in loans, still outstanding, was made to Leave.EU. He famously pledged £1 million to UKIP in 2014, at a time when the organisation’s finances were stalling. Without Banks, the political potency of the party may well have fizzled out. In 2016, his company, Better for the Country Ltd, also bought almost £2 million in pro-Brexit merchandise and donated it to Grassroots Out, another Brexit campaigning group. In total, his political contributions have come to nearly £10 million.
That would mean he might have given away almost half of what he made from Brightside to political causes. That seems amazingly generous.
“Serious and widespread failings”
As his own tweeted rebuke of the Financial Times suggested, central to the Banks mythology is the sale of Brightside Plc. in 2014. The buyer was private equity firm Anacap. Although he tweeted that the sale had been for £145 million, it was reported at the time as being worth only £127 million. How much, though, did Banks get?
The story starts in 2001 when Banks set up Group Direct, which was the principal operating company for his insurance brand Commercial Vehicle Direct. Group Direct made losses of over £400,000 in its first two years of operation, before finally turning a profit in 2004.
By 2006, overall debts had increased to £34 million, but the group appeared to be growing strongly, with turnover of £20 million. Banks began to aim for a public listing of the group. The same year, he became a director of Brightside, at that time a recently formed debt management service aimed at the personal insolvency market. Crucially, Brightside was already listed on AIM, the junior stock exchange.
In June 2008, the original Banks insurance group took part in a transaction known as a ‘reverse takeover’, in which a listed company takes over a much larger unlisted company. This allows the unlisted company to obtain a listing on a stock exchange quicker than usual. Under the terms of the deal, Brightside duly bought the three companies which constituted Group Direct. The £50 million valuation put on these companies seemed high but the deal did not boost Banks’ bank account – as the consideration for the deal was in Brightside shares.
Then, in 2008, the financial crisis hit. As with many businesses, Banks’ lending facilities came under pressure. But Banks was still able to raise money from Brightside’s shareholders: in 2009 and 2010 the company raised a total of £29 million, attracting investors with its eye-catching growth rate and ambitious plans to acquire other companies.
Two of the assets Banks’ firm acquired were the little-known insurance brands “E-Car” and “E-Bike.” The price was an initial £15.5 million, with £19.1 million deferred, based on future profitability.
In fact, both brands were owned by Southern Rock Insurance, a company of which Banks, Gannon and Chase-Gardener collectively owned 72%.
Two other companies, “E Systems” and “E Development” were bought for a further £17 million in 2011. At the time E Development had net liabilities of over £500,000. E-systems had been set up just months before the sale by Banks, and Brightside IT director Simon Jones. It had no other customers than Brightside.
These acquisitions seem hard to justify, but in documents sent to Brightside shareholders notifying them of the proposed purchase of E-Systems and E-Development, the company stated that they had received undertakings from Banks and his fellow directors that the funds would be used to shore up the firms under-writer, Southern Rock, and thus allow Brightside to continue trading. And this is, indeed, what happened.
However, within the year Banks was fired from his role at Brightside. He famously recounted how he punched his partner and friend, Jim Gannon, in the face, when the solicitor broke the news to him.
Banks remained a shareholder in Brightside and in 2013, sold a tranche of his shares for £6 million to a competitor, Markerstudy, which was said to be contemplating a bid for the company. After conducting due diligence and negotiating with the Brightside board however, Markerstudy declined to make a full bid, with their CEO describing Brightside as “over-valued”.
In 2014, the investment firm Anacap arrived and thought differently. They bought Brightside in its entirety, paying £127 million to take control.
Anacap have since alleged in court that the new management team discovered “serious and widespread failings” throughout the company, many dating from Banks’ time as CEO and Chief Insurance Officer. All of the purchases of Banks’ companies (E-Car, E-Bike, E-Systems, and E Development) were confirmed to be worth far less than had been paid for them. The software supplied by E-systems was said to barely function and the Brightside website was hacked and remained inoperable for over a month. Court documents obtained during our investigation allege widespread failings, including an incendiary allegation that the company was “in breach of its banking covenants and insolvent on a net asset basis.” There were also, according to the same documents, no correct systems in place for the handling of client funds.
All of the purchases of Banks’ companies were confirmed to be worth far less than had been paid for them.
For an insurance company, this was a particularly serious problem. Anacap replaced several senior staff and board members including the CFO, Paul Chase-Gardener. Over £35 million of value had to be written off from the Brightside balance sheet, in part because Anacap deemed the E-Car, E-Bike, E-Systems and E-Development purchases had been grossly overvalued. Within a year of the takeover, the new owners also had to plough in an additional £40 million to prevent the business from going bust. Further large write downs were made in 2015. Court documents show that £12 million had to be inserted in a failed attempt to repair the IT system alone, with numerous other consultants brought in to clear up the problems the new owners found.
openDemocracy asked Banks to comment on Anacap’s view of the value of these businesses. He declined to reply to our specific questions, instead sending a copy of a letter which his lawyers wrote to the BBC in May of this year. In this letter his lawyers say: “The offer from Anacap to acquire Brightside was announced in May 2014 nearly two years after Mr Banks had left the company.”
In 2016, Anacap began legal action against Chase-Gardener and Brightside’s auditors for failures to adequately manage the business and present accurate financial reports. With the assistance of his brother Jonathan, a Hong Kong based lawyer, Banks was able to settle out of court in May 2015. Privately, many of the new senior management team brought in by Anacap wanted to pursue the case against him. As part of their settlement with Banks, Anacap were able to extricate Brightside from contracts with other Banks controlled businesses, such as Southern Rock, which they described as “onerous.” The case against Chase-Gardener is still being pursued in the High Court, where Anacap are seeking £20 million in damages from him. The auditors, BDO (now part of RMS Tenon), are facing a claim of around £50 million.
Southern Rock in difficulty
Arron Banks with former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Ben Birchall/PA Images. All rights reserved.While at Brightside, Banks had been able to partly re-finance the ailing Southern Rock, through buying E-Cars, E-Systems, E-Development and E-Bike from the Gibraltar based group. But the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission had also passed their report to the Financial Conduct Authority in London for review.
The authorities in London concurred with the Gibraltar regulator’s findings, that Southern Rock had been trading without sufficient reserves, and in 2013 Banks voluntarily recused himself from the FCA register. He stepped down as a director of Southern Rock in 2014. Both regulators had effectively barred him from holding a position of control within an insurance business.
He also had to balance the books. While the funds from the sale of E-systems and E-development were passed to Southern Rock, this still left the business short of the capital needed to fund its loss reserves as the company struggled with high claim levels and a challenging market. He told Private Eye he had agreed to find £40 million to re-capitalise the business. Banks claims that Southern Rock is now a profitable company. The letter from his lawyers to the BBC, forwarded to openDemocracy, says “Southern Rock Insurance Company Limited recorded a profit of £42 million in its latest set of filed accounts (2015).”
Banks frequently boasts about running an insurance business. The reality is that he is not permitted, at the moment, to run his own insurance company.
In fact, the accounts show an underlying loss of £27.9 million on its underwriting and insurance activities in 2015 – and while the company did report a profit of £41.5 million overall, this came only after selling the rights to the “ancillary income” on its motor insurance policies for £17.5 million, and the rights to the “finance arrangement fees” for £60.2 million to another company owned by Banks, Isle of Man-based ICS Risk Solutions. Ancillary income is an umbrella term for any money an insurance company makes on top of ordinary under-writing risks, for example from instalments or administration charges.
Given Southern Rock had only written 197,000 motor insurance policies at this time, paying nearly £78m for these rights seemed a high valuation. These assets had also not been recorded in the Southern Rock balance sheet prior to their sale, and resulted in the company booking a large capital gain. Crucially, it was the value of these sales that enabled Southern Rock to meet its obligation under the solvency regulations, and post a profit in its accounts for this year.
Whether Southern Rock will be able to do the same next year, which will likely be required under the terms of capital restructuring deal mandated by the regulators, is unclear. Banks strongly contests the assertion that Southern Rock is in difficulty, pointing out that the Gibraltar regulator, Southern Rock’s independent auditors and the London-based Financial Conduct Authority have approved the arrangements, and that all the payments to date from ICS Risk Solution, which Southern Rock relies on to remain solvent, have been made on time and in full. The letter from his lawyers states: “The future solvency of [Southern Rock] is not dependent on any particular future transaction.”
As for the regulators’ demand that Banks “voluntarily” recuse himself, he has abided by the ruling, but appointed his Hong Kong-based brother in his stead. His name and signature still appeared on a 2014 annual report filed at Companies House, where he was named as a “director.” “This mistake arose from an administrative error,” he told us in a written statement, “which was corrected as soon as it was detected. Once the error was noted, the accounts were withdrawn and resubmitted to Companies House.” He continues to control Southern Rock and Eldon Insurance, owner of the GoSkippy brand, through his holding company ICS Risk Solutions.
Banks frequently boasts about running an insurance business. The reality is that he is not permitted, at the moment, to run his own insurance company. A letter from the Financial Conduct Authority concerning the investigation into his insurance activities, dated 17th July 2017, states that “Mr Banks does not have FCA approval to carry out an operational executive role at Eldon Insurance Services Ltd,” his new firm.
Banks’s Isle of Man-based ICS Risk Solutions is a curious organisation too. In theory, this is the ultimate holding company for Banks’s insurance empire. Yet according to a source with good knowledge of its finances, ICS Risk Solutions has just £1 million in assets, and still owes £60.2 million in monthly instalments, to Southern Rock. These payments are expected to continue until December 2020. A letter from Banks’ lawyers confirming this also said “there is no reason to doubt that the remaining outstanding amounts will be paid in full and on time,” and that Southern Rock is required to report monthly to the Gibraltar authorities, “to confirm the payment of each monthly instalment,” and so “any failure to pay would be immediately apparent.”
Banks’ present financial status is then somewhat unclear, and sometimes dependent on buying assets from one company, in order to shore up another company he himself holds a stake in. But it does seem clear that his claimed worth of £100 million is hard to justify. In the letter sent to openDemocracy, Banks claimed his worth could be even higher than £100 million, saying that he would “broadly agree” with an analysis made by the Sunday Times Rich Times list that his net worth could instead be some £250 million. When asked to explain how he accounts for all this extra wealth, Banks declined to comment.
A Lazarus-like recovery
Banks’s finances seem to have had a remarkable recovery in early 2014. But based on a full review of all the publicly available information about his companies, it is unclear where this money could have come from.
He first had to settle a tax bill with HMRC for £1.86 million, a cheque which he subsequently sent to the Guardian newspaper to prove he was paying his taxes.
In April 2014, the MailOnline reported how Banks had raised eyebrows when he bought £2 million of shares in an AIM-listed chemicals company called Iofina – a sector he had shown no prior interest in. The company produces iodine in an industrial process which takes place alongside fracking. It had never turned a profit and swallowed up large amounts of capital as chemical prices shrank due to reduced demand. Banks’s investment is nursing a huge loss.
In June 2014, he set up Chartwell Political, a PR company which would go on to work on the Leave campaign with Jim Pryor, a former Tory party spokesman who had also worked on FW deClerk’s campaign against Nelson Mandela in South Africa and former Sunday Mirror editor Bridget Rowe, a close friend of Nigel Farage. The company would rack up losses of over £300,000 by June 2015.
Banks would go on to spend a total of £9.6 million of his personal fortune funding the organisations which arguably clinched Brexit. This accounted then for half of his lifetime earnings.
The next month, in July 2014, Banks bought more shares in STM Group plc, which offers “wealth preservation solutions,” and specialises in setting up offshore trusts and companies. He bought over £600,000 worth of shares – on top of an existing shareholding. This brought his total share value up to £1.5 million.
By September 2014, Banks had also bought a loss-making, family-run jewellery shop in Bristol, for an undisclosed sum, and lent the firm some £200,000, and by February 2015 he was the owner of four diamond mines in South Africa.
The diamond market had fallen sharply since the financial crash and big players, such as de Beers, began to withdraw from older mines picked clean and requiring huge investment to return to profitable production. Many of these mines had changed hands several times in the years since. One of the mines Banks picked up had collapsed in value from a reported £12 million valuation in 2005, to as little as £200,000 by the time Banks bought.
One of the four mines also remains closed, according to Banks’s website, another contains just “tailings,” meaning there little more than piles of waste to scrabble through. What exactly motivated Banks to buy these mines remains unclear.
Crucially, October 2014 also marked the time Banks began his extraordinarily lavish political spending campaign, with his first £1 million pledge to the United Kingdom Independence Party. Interestingly, Banks never came fully good on this promise – dripping in just over £400,000 in cash instalments over the next six months. Nevertheless, Banks’s 2014 spending alone, or what can be seen of it from publicly available records, came to an estimated £5 million. This was a very large sum given the pressure he was under from the Gibraltar regulators. We also estimate it to be just under a quarter of his total gross earnings of £22m – from his various businesses – since 2001.
Nor did his political spending slow down. Banks would go on to spend a total of £9.6 million of his personal fortune funding the organisations which arguably clinched Brexit: Leave.EU, UKIP and Better for the Country Ltd (set up by STM Fidecs). This accounted then for half of his lifetime earnings – an amazingly generous amount.
One of his most lavish donations was some £2 million to Grassroots Out via Better for the Country Ltd, which was categorised to the Electoral Commission as “non-cash” – a designation usually reserved for the provision of office space or in-kind services to political parties. In reality, even this “non-cash” donation cost Banks significant amounts of hard cash. In a letter to openDemocracy, Banks’ lawyers say Better for the Country bought “merchandise, leaflets, billboards, pens, badges and other paraphernalia,” before donating all of this to Grassroots Out.
In early 2016, he used Better for the Country to make cash donations to Trade Unionists Against the European Union, and another pro-Brexit group called Veterans for Britain. Banks also provided £100,000 to Martin Durkin, a climate change sceptic and producer of “Brexit: The Movie,” a controversial online documentary produced to support the campaign. The sum was equivalent to a third of the documentary’s reported budget.
These donations were all the more remarkable because his new insurance company, founded after Banks left Brightside, was now also requiring large amounts of investment, according to industry experts. Eldon Insurance achieved a profit of just £281,000 on a turnover of £33.6 million in 2015.
Earlier this year, Banks attempted a £200m fundraising effort for Eldon, according to the Times, but was unable to raise the finance from City investors and abandoned the listing. Profits fell further in 2016, to just £165,000. Earlier this month, Banks announced he was attempting a second public listing, and aiming for a valuation of some £250m. He claims to be forecasting a dramatic increase in profits – anywhere between £25m and £28m for the year. To support this claim he provided the Mail on Sunday with unpublished figures showing the profits for the first six months of the year. We asked for a copy of these, but his spokesperson did not respond.
To drum up business, Banks’ insurance brand GoSkippy now advertises heavily on Leave.EU’s websites, social media and email marketing. However there are numerous reports of poor customer service, onerous terms obfuscated in confusing small-print and administrative failings by the company, some of which have left motorists unaware that they were no longer insured. In response, Banks commented that “Eldon works very hard on complaints and actively reviews its processes off the back of both internal and external audits of both customer service quality and compliance with regularity requirements,” saying their main brand GoSkippy had complaint levels below 3 per 1000 customers, and that a maximum of 4 per 1000 was the industry guideline.
Southern Rock, despite its difficulties both before and after the regulators’ intervention, has until very recently been the principal under-writer of both Banks’ Go Skippy brand and the Debenhams Insurance brand. The letter from Banks’ lawyers points out that the recapitalisation plan designed to allow Southern Rock to meet its solvency obligations were approved by the regulator and the company’s independent auditors and that they have a perfect record of delivering their monthly payments to date on time and in full.
It is clear, however, that the company only posted a profit last year by relying on the £60 million generated from selling rights to other companies controlled by Banks. To continue to trade on a solvent basis in the years to come, Southern Rock will need to have a profitable underlying business, or have additional cash injections.
And Banks’ own Eldon Insurance, which owns GoSkippy, now plans to move its business from Southern Rock – instead setting up a “managing general agent” called Somerset Bridge, which will be arranging under-writing services from a different Gibraltarian under-writer, backed by a Bermuda-based reinsurer.
The fabric of our democracy
Interestingly, our review of Banks’ business empire also shows a huge cross-over between the key figures in Leave.EU and Banks’ businesses. Leave.EU’s Chief Executive Officer Liz Bilney serves on the board of numerous Banks’ companies.
Leave.EU’s director of communications, the Belizean diplomat and close associate of Lord Ashcroft, Andy Wigmore, was appointed to the board of Southern Rock in 2014 and joined Eldon Insurance in December 2015, despite having no background within the industry.
Crucial to maintaining the fabric of democracy in Britain is understanding where large donors have made their money, and just as importantly, how.
Banks holds a substantial share in Manx Financial, an Isle of Man banking group controlled by Leave.EU’s early backer and co-founder Jim Mellon. The meagre profits of Manx Financial have not yet provided dividends to its investors – including Banks.
Crucial to maintaining the fabric of democracy in Britain is understanding where large donors have made their money, and just as importantly, how.
Our review of the publicly available records for Banks’ business empire, and his own public statements, has revealed a patchwork of legal disputes, regulator interventions, and poor corporate governance. Two of Banks’ claimed previous employers have denied he ever worked for them. The value of his businesses are materially lower than Banks’ own inflated boasts and, while still a wealthy man, was he wealthy enough to give so much to the Brexit campaign, without some other undisclosed source of income?
How Banks could afford to give so lavishly remains a mystery. There is no doubt that Banks did more than most to make Brexit happen – the question is, how could he afford it?
MP calls for inquiry into Arron Banks and ‘dark money’ in EU referendum
Ben Bradshaw raises concerns over ‘foreign interference’ and says there are questions over wealth of leave campaign’s biggest backer
The money given by Arron Banks to Leave.EU in the run-up to the referendum was the biggest donation in British political history. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
A Labour MP has said there are “real questions” about how much Arron Banks – the entrepreneur who bankrolled Brexit – is worth as he called on the government to investigate the possible role played by “dark money” in the EU referendum.
Speaking in parliament, Ben Bradshaw said there was “widespread concern over foreign and particularly Russian interference in western democracies”. He described as “very worrying” a series of investigative reports published this week by the Open Democracy website into the funding of the Leave campaign.
The money given by Banks to Leave.EU in the run-up to the referendum was the biggest donation in British political history. The Bristol-based businessman says he contributed almost £9m in cash, loans and services to pro-Brexit causes. It is impossible to determine what impact – if any – his donations had on the result.
Banks has previously claimed he is worth £100m. An estimate by the Sunday Times puts his fortune at £250m. However, an analysis by Open Democracy suggests the actual figure may be considerably lower.
Bradshaw asked the leader of the Commons, Andrea Leadsom, if she had seen the reports “about the role of dark money in the EU referendum campaign”. They included “revelations of illegal donations” and “new questions today over the real wealth of Arron Banks, the main financial backer of leave”.
Bradshaw urged parliament and the Electoral Commission to examine these claims “very carefully”. Given the Kremlin’s role in influencing elections elsewhere, they should “reassure the country that all the resources spent in the referendum were from permissible sources”, he told MPs.
According to Bradshaw, the “illegal” donation to Brexit was made via the Democratic Unionist party in Northern Ireland. The person behind the £435,000 payment made in 2016 before the referendum remains a mystery. Rules have now been changed to introduce greater transparency, but it is unclear who – or what – lay behind these funds.
The analysis by Open Democracy says that in September 2013 Banks’s financial affairs were in trouble. His underwriting business Southern Rock was under scrutiny from financial regulators in Gibraltar and had reserves below what was required. Banks said he invested £40m in the business to plug any shortfall and resigned as a director.
“A year later, these financial worries seem to have completely evaporated. Banks had begun buying diamond mines, investing millions into chemical companies and wealth management firms, setting up loss-making political consultancies, and most famous of all – funding Ukip,” Open Democracy wrote.
The article adds: “One question remains though. If Banks was in such a tight spot in September 2013, how did he manage to be so generous the following year?”
There are a number of perfectly innocent ways that Banks could have obtained the extra funds, Open Democracy admits. Much of his wealth is held in opaque offshore jurisdictions including Belize, the Isle of Man, the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar, making an assessment of his fortune difficult.
Banks didn’t immediately comment. His spokesman has previously described his businesses including Southern Rock as profitable and sustainable, and says that Banks “broadly agrees” with the £250m estimate of his fortune.
Replying for the government, Leadsom described Bradshaw’s question as “incredibly important” and said that any specific information concerning wrongdoing should be referred to the Electoral Commission.
“I absolutely share his concern that all donations should be permissible and legal,” she said.
I try to make every effort to NOT infringe copyrights in any commercial way & make all corrections of fact brought to my attention by an identifiable individual
you may well find this lengthy article well worth reading – you will note I have already brought many of these facts to your attention in earlier posting, you can of course check much of it by using the sidebars on this site and utilisation of the >SEARCH< box on this site – for instance do enter Arron Banks in the search box or George Cottrell and see what revelations that provides.
You may also find entries at CLICK HERE and also HERE of interest.
About
George Cottrell
Farage with Cottrell in June 2016
Born
George Swinfen Cottrell October 1993 (age 23)London, England
Criminal Charges
Conspiracy to commit money laundering, money laundering, wire fraud, mail fraud, blackmail and extortion.
The articles below are copied from the web site https://georgecottrell.wordpress.com/ This is NOT my web site and I have no control over its content, nor am I wittingly in contact with its owner or controler(s), therefore I can not vouch for its absolute accuracy however many of the facts I know to be correct and none have I noted to be, to my knowledge inaccurate, therefore I present it in good faith and in the belief that it presents accurate facts.
Make of it what you will. I was interested to note the details of criminality & links with Russia and money laundering which I was aware of and note that it confirms the details which I was aware of!
On Friday, August 18th 2017 Cottrell and Farage were photographed together outside a London pub.
In addition to the security detail they were joined by Farage’s French mistress Laure Ferrari currently investigation by the European Anti-Fraud Office.
Cottrell departed with Farage and Ferrari in chauffeur driven Range Rover.
On October 1st 2014 Arron Banks, an obscure insurance executive, announced a £1 million donation to Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party an alliance that would go on to disrupt global politics.
Banks pictured with Farage announcing a £1 million donation
In the subsequent three years Banks’ has increased his fortune by hundreds of millions, accumulated an offshore insurance empire, obtained diplomatic status, bankrolled Brexit, befriended Trump and become a diamond mine proprietor – many times over.
While growing his consumer motor insurance company Southern Rock in 2013 Banks was introduced by his Bermudan lawyer to Apex Fund Services in Grand Cayman to discuss some reinsurance opportunities. Coincidentally Apex were the custodians of a secretive multi billion dollar money fund administered by a cluster of Nevis foundations.
This highly suspect arrangement was being represented by an army of securities lawyers and accountants however one connected entity was being fronted by a then 19-year-old George Swinfen Cottrell: T1 Group. Cottrell has never disclosed his exact role beyond describing himself as a “junior advisor” because T1 Group was never regulated, licensed or authorized to transact securities.
Banks and Cottrell both own houses in Gloucestershire and Mustique
Never more than six feet away from Banks is his permatan right hand man Andrew Wigmore, a well connected Belizian diplomat and fixer. Wigmore is a serial strawman – a nominee shareholder and registered representative for hundreds of entities. Protected from prosecution by his diplomatic immunity he illegally shelters offshore wealth from tax authorities and shields assets from creditors. Wigmore was formerly an associate of Boris Berezovsky, an exiled Russian billionaire, who was a business partner of Cottrell’s mentor Scot Young.
Connections to Russia are well established
It is unknown whether Banks or Wigmore ever met or engaged in business with Cottrell prior to October 2014 when Cottrell, who had recently been terminated by Banca Privada d’Andorra, was employed by Precision Risk and Intelligence – a company owned and controlled by Banks.
Sources within the United Kingdom Independence Party have confirmed that Cottrell’s noticeable involvement began during the 2015 general election when he was dispatched to a target constituency to coordinate the local campaign. The candidate, a prominent businessman, Jamie Huntman was a key ally of Banks and was referenced repeatedly in The Bad Boys of Brexit.
Huntman was unsuccessful in his bid for office but not for want of money, invoices seen by this blog indicate that statutory spending limits were grossly exceeded – a criminal offense. Larger invoices were routinely countersigned by Cottrell in addition to the local agent. Cottrell, as many suspected then, was no more than Banks’ representative, spending the millions his boss had donated.
It was just before midday on November 11th 2010 when Paul Castle threw himself under a tube train in what was an apparent suicide. Earlier that morning his life had been threatened by Russian mobsters, representing one of his many dangerous creditors.
Paul Castle, a multi-millionaire property mogul and polo playing friend of Prince Charles was doing a favor for an old friend when he agreed to give the young, recently expelled, George Cottrell some work experience. Castle was an acquaintance of Cottrell’s aristocratic, former Penthouse Pet mother Fiona who had once dated Prince Charles.
A little after a month following Cottrell’s unceremonious dismissal from his exclusive boarding school — due to his illegal gambling proclivities having been uncovered — he was walking to Castle’s Brook Street office for what was meant to be a short informal interview prior to his first day. Upon Cottrell’s arrival, it was apparent that Castle was otherwise engaged, a shouting match had broken out on the staircase which was being blocked by heavies. Castle was in a tense negotiation with a notorious Singaporean hard money lender.
Scot Young was quick to respond to Castle’s pleas for help, interrupting his lunch and rushing over from nearby Mount Street, Young was able to placate this creditor by promising full settlement the next day — in cash. Embarrassed by what Cottrell had witnessed and sensitive to the fact that Cottrell’s father was also a creditor Castle proposed that the interview be conducted over lunch. That afternoon Cottrell, Castle and Young decamped to Scott’s restaurant and spent the rest of the day drinking champagne to forget.
Nothing would ever be the same; 48-hours later Castle would be dead, and Young fearing for his life would go in to hiding.
The exact events leading up to Cottrell’s subsequent business dealings with Young two years later are shrouded in secrecy and have been deliberately obfuscated.
Cottrell never qualified high school and was therefore ineligible to attend university, he gained an internship at a small specialist corporate finance house a year hence but this does not explain the protracted gap. Interestingly Cottrell was appointed a director, for one day, of an entity called Upsilon Investments which was registered to one of his offshore trust properties in Kensington. He was listed as a co-director with an individual named Vivian Combs a name that has appeared as a nominee director for a Young linked shell entity. The precise activities of Upsilon are not immediately clear, no financials were ever filed and its nature of business was classified as “financial intermediation not elsewhere classified.”
Young’s history of money laundering, tax evasion and other criminal activity is suitably documented. An infamous fixer for the super-rich, he had extensive Russian contacts and links to organized crime. He was jailed in January 2013 for contempt of court relating to his efforts to conceal a supposed multi-billion-pound fortune.
Starting in late 2012 Cottrell based himself out of an office located at 44 Hertford Street, the same building which accommodated Young’s office. The peculiar arrangement was located on two upper floors, meanwhile the ground floor setup involved an airport-style metal detector for a short while allegedly to “screen contractors.” Much of the floor space was consumed by filing cabinets and company registrar folders occupied every inch of shelfing. The main boardroom, located at the front of the building, was converted in to Cottrell and Young’s joint office shared only with lingering stale cigarette smoke.
During Youngs incarceration it has been difficult to identify anyone who would have been tasked with managing his complex affairs, recent deaths in his inner circle were not just limited to Castle. This blog has been made aware of a supposed mutual legal assistance treaty seeking information relating to Cottrell’s involvement around this time with Young.
Cottrell and Young were regular fixtures at Scott’s restaurant, which they nonchalantly referred to as the “cafeteria” given its proximity to their office, and at Boujis nightclub in South Kensington near Cottrell’s residence. Given the degree of scrutiny Young was subject to his inexperienced protégé would have made an excellent conduit to repatriate his offshore wealth.
It wasn’t to last; by April 2014 Cottrell had finally been identified by the U.S. Department of Treasury while on December 8th Young would plummet four stories on to iron railings in an alleged suicide.
Shortly after the initial publication of this blog Cottrell granted an exclusive tell-all interview to The Daily Telegraph.
Although nearly 3,000 words in length the article fails to identify or explain the extent of Cottrell’s criminality.
Scroll down for the full analysis:
George Cottrell was a minor aristocrat, a UKIP fundraiser and member of Nigel Farage’s inner circle, a self-made millionaire and a compulsive gambler, all by the age of 23. And then US federal agents caught up with him… He tells William Cash about his spectacular fall from grace
Seated in a dark suit with a glass of claret in front of him at lunch recently in the Sydney Arms in Chelsea, George Cottrell describes the evening of 23 June 2016 as ‘the best night of my life – something I’ll never forget’.
On that day of the EU referendum poll, indeed throughout that overheated political summer, Cottrell had been in the ‘jump seat’ at Nigel Farage’s side, working as his aide-de-camp, gatekeeper and campaign fixer – from booking his helicopters to letting Simpson’s Tavern in the City know that Nigel was on the way for what he likes to call a ‘PFL’ (Proper F—ing Lunch).
At the age of just 23, Cottrell is accustomed to the high life: he’s the nephew of Lord Hesketh, the aristocratic former Tory minister and F1 racing-team owner, and his mother Fiona – once a Penthouse Pet of the Month – was romantically linked to Prince Charles in the late 1970s.
On referendum day, Cottrell decided that the best way for Farage’s inner entourage – including donor Arron Banks – to calm their nerves was a PFL at Zafferano, an Italian restaurant in Belgravia. Once the third bottle of chianti was opened, the mood improved. ‘We spent most of the time talking about what would happen if we lost, and Arron told me I was a pessimist and that we would win. But Nigel was pretty brooding throughout.’
However, when Sunderland voted for leave by a bigger than expected margin, Cottrell sensed a betting opportunity. ‘At 10pm, I couldn’t believe I was still getting 9/1 [for a majority leave vote],’ he says. ‘We were in our campaign office and I was tracking all the major stock indices, the dollar and pound currency markets. When it got to 3am, I was getting my managers out of bed to get me another 50 grand on here, another 50 grand there, to short sterling. I just couldn’t help myself.’
Tim Shipman claims in his book All Out War that Nigel Farage conceded the referendum at 10 pm to enable his inner circle to profit.
Cottrell won a six-figure sum that night but promptly ‘lost most of it the next day, on some horse running called Exit Europe or something like that. I was a compulsive, habitual, addicted gambler.’ Generous but self-effacing, with a sharp memory, Cottrell relates the events of that day and night with the self-assurance that the English public-school system produces – a chauffeur brought him to lunch, and only later did I realise he had bodyguards in attendance.
Cottrell continually boasted about his gambling escapades and his “whale” status at various casinos. Cottrell’s prolific gambling also enabled him to mask his personal tax affairs by repatriating his illegally obtained, untaxed offshore wealth in the form of casino chips which would be redeemed for cash. Cottrell had a covert security detail in 2011/12 that was exclusively Russian.
Just three weeks after the referendum vote, this appetite for high stakes nearly ended up with Cottrell gambling away two decades of his life to a maximum security US jail. Having attended the Republican convention in Cleveland in July, he was confronted by eight armed federal Inland Revenue Service (IRS) agents as he got off a plane in Chicago, with Nigel Farage just behind him. He was handcuffed and detained in a local federal jail. Back in Britain, ‘Posh George’ – as he is known within Farage’s inner circle – became big news: the Daily Mirror headline was ‘Farage aide faces 20 years for blackmail drug plot’.
Until now, Cottrell has given no interviews about what happened when he stepped off that plane in Chicago and disappeared for eight months into the bowels of the US justice system, holed up with gang leaders and murderers.
Cottrell conducted his interview with The Telegraph shortly after the initial publication of this blog. He was interviewed by William Cash a former UKIP candidate and son of British MP Sir Bill Cash. The Telegraph is owned by the billionaire Barclay brothers who incidentally are significant UKIP donors.
‘Prison life was fascinating and had I not have been to boarding school it would have been infinitely harder,’ says Cottrell. ‘I was housed in maximum-security facilities in Chicago and Arizona. I was placed with murderers, rapists, paedophiles, assassins, Isil terrorists, cartel kingpins and even a Mafia boss. I had to fight for my life on an almost daily basis. I still have fractured ribs today.’ Due to his case’s media profile, for the majority of his nine-month incarceration he was provided with his own cell.
Cottrell’s special treatment was no doubt facilitated by his political connections and $2,000 per hour attorney.
It was a bewildering fall for a the scion of a landed Yorkshire family. He was educated in Mustique followed by Malvern College, which he left aged 16 after being reprimanded for a gambling habit so bad that he was reading the Racing Post at 12 and betting illegally in bookies. Unsurprisingly, Cottrell says, he fell out with his family over the episode.
Cottrell was disinherited from a £250 million family trust fund following his expulsion from his exclusive British boarding school, Malvern College.
The habit at least gave him a head for numbers and complicated financial trades, and he was offered a job raising capital for a corporate finance house. This led to him, aged just 19, helping to set up a multibillion-pound private office in Mayfair for a well-known ‘international’ family. ‘I was the youngest person there by a long way,’ he says. ‘They took me under their wing, and I was taught the ropes, so to speak.’
Cottrell interned at Maxim Corporate Finance following his expulsion from Malvern College. He was listed as a director for ARA Capital, an entity controlled by Russian billionaire and Putin ally Roman Abramovich.
He learned about the murky and complicated world of ‘shadow banking’, secret offshore accounts and sophisticated financial structures in such jurisdictions as Panama, Andorra and Switzerland. He did well, and was soon working as a London-based banker for an offshore private bank (which was under investigation by the US authorities as a ‘foreign financial institution of primary money-laundering concern’). It was these skills that landed Cottrell an unpaid role in 2016, running Nigel Farage’s private office at UKIP’s Mayfair headquarters and, in the run-up to the EU referendum, as a chief fundraiser for the party. The young Cottrell moved into Farage’s glass office and had ‘my Berry Bros wine collection stashed in the cabinet’.
Cottrell fraudulently concealed and disguised ultimate beneficial ownership information during the formation of these financial structures. Cottrell on at least one occasion submitting stolen passport information on a Form A declaration.
His contribution? To ‘successfully raise millions’ during campaigning, and he says, ‘It was very important for [donors] to have face time with Nigel, and that’s where I came in. My role with fundraising meant that I was also looking after Nigel.’
Cottrell illegally financed UKIP and Leave.EU by soliciting and accepting impermissible donations.
Cottrell’s often reckless temperament may help to explain the unusually close bond between him and Farage. Did he view Nigel as a father figure?
‘Yes,’ replied George. ‘In many things. I mean, I still do.’
Did Farage know how bad his gambling problem had become? ‘Yes. It was out of control. I’d saunter to the William Hill round the corner with a Harvey Nichols bag with 50 grand in it, to have a bet on the 2.05 at Lingfield on a horse I knew nothing about. I was neglecting work, friends, family, girlfriends. It was all-consuming.’
Cottrell would regularly carry aroundlarge amounts of cash often in sealed casino packets of £5,000.
How did it affect him when he lost?
‘It didn’t really. It happened so regularly’.
Despite the losses, Cottrell managed to maintain a millionaire lifestyle from the age of 18 to 21, with a concierge looking after him 24 hours a day. ‘I always managed to fund my gambling,’ he says. ‘Later on, I was earning millions and losing millions.’
Cottrell was illegally earning money by facilitating tax evasion and money laundering. Cottrell would charge a basic 10% plus a percentage of anticipated tax savings.
His role at the offshore bank was to bring in new custom and he quickly learnt how private bankers did business with clients. ‘No business cards. No emails. Meetings in person. Lots of travel. Most of our correspondence was done by mail.’ And rule number one: never meet clients in the continental United States. ‘We were not licensed to operate there and we were under scrutiny,’ adds Cottrell.
Cottrell would maintain little or no paper trail as he was fully aware of his criminal conduct. Cottrell failed to gain FCA, SEC and CYSEC authorization.
The offshore ‘leading-edge tax solutions’ that Cottrell was putting in place were to maximise tax efficiency. They were not illegal, he claims. ‘We’re talking about people who have just completed an IPO [initial public offering], they’re about to receive hundreds of millions of dollars, and they needed the tax structures put in place and the offshore banking mechanisms to provide pension provision and the like.’
The tax structures were essentially money laundering services exclusively marketed to tax dodgers, organized crime and individuals facing bankruptcy/divorce proceedings who wanted to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the funds or assets.
While working for the bank, Cottrell was contacted by two Arizona businessmen who wanted to sell their multimillion-dollar property portfolio and were interested in the services Cottrell’s bank could offer. They wanted to meet at the earliest possible convenience in America. ‘I checked with my boss and with compliance: that’s a no-no. I first said I couldn’t meet with them but while my more experienced colleagues weren’t willing to take the risks in North America, I was. The meeting was proposed to be in Las Vegas. And I can’t resist gambling.’
Cottrell was contracted by offshore banks as a “financial intermediary” as such internal compliance would not have screened his prospective leads unless they contacted the bank first. Cottrell was obtaining leads from a dark web user identified in court documents as “Banker”.
Cottrell flew to Vegas and met the two businessmen in their hotel suite. Dinner followed at ‘a great Michelin-star restaurant, and I get handed the wine list. I was 20 years old and hadn’t been ID’d. When the pudding arrived, one of the businessmen leaned in to the round marble table and said, “George, we’ve got something to tell you. We make about two and a half million a year trafficking cocaine from Phoenix to New York, in net profits.” So I say, “What about the property?” “Oh, we do have some.” I say, “Well, this is very interesting, what kind of margins are there on that?” Yeah, drunk me, asking a question.’
Cottrell is a alcoholic who has a habbit of ordering the most expensive wine to impress people.
The meeting continued for another 10 minutes then Cottrell took the next flight back to London. ‘It was a very scary situation when you’re sitting in front of two people who have just represented that they’re trafficking millions of dollars’ worth of drugs on a regular basis,’ he recalls. ‘I knew that I had a duty to report their serious criminality. But a colleague said, “If you do report it, we’re going to be under the microscope. If they contact you again, then you report it.”’
Cottrell was already involved in extensive criminality which could have been discovered by making a report to law enforcement.
Cottrell heard nothing. ‘I just put it down to a bad experience,’ he says.
That was back in 2014. It wasn’t until July 2016 that Cottrell stepped off that plane in Chicago and was placed under arrest. He had no idea why he was being charged. From jail, he was allowed to call the British embassy in Washington DC, who told him that the US State Department had just informed them that he had been arrested for ‘financial irregularities’. It was now 3am on Saturday morning and he was allowed one more call, to his parents in London, which ended swiftly when the phone went dead. He had no lawyer, no phone and still no idea what these ‘irregularities’ were.
Cottrell’s email and bank accounts were immediately seized upon his arrest according to reports at the time however financial court filings are still under seal.
On the eighth floor of a skyscraper federal prison in downtown Chicago, Cottrell was strip-searched, put into an orange jumpsuit and told to sleep on a metal bench, ahead of his court appearance the following day.
The next morning, he was transported to court in a police convoy. ‘I felt like I was a terrorist,’ he says. ‘I’m brought up in shackles and handcuffs, chained round my waist. And I walk into this courtroom, and a dishevelled lawyer hands me his card, and says, “Mr Cottrell, until you can arrange your own counsel, I’m a public defender. I’m going to be representing you.”’ The lawyer handed Cottrell an eight-page document in which George read that he was being charged on 21 counts including ‘conspiracy to commit money-laundering, money-laundering, wire fraud, mail fraud, blackmail and extortion. Penalties: 20 years, basically, each charge,’ he says.
Cottrell’s statutory maximum penalty was 20 years.
Cottrell was later accused of using various banks under investigation to launder dirty money for drug cartels and other criminals, and also offering his offshore expertise on the dark web. George was to learn that the two businessmen he had met in Las Vegas were in fact IRS federal agents who were ‘all wired. The whole restaurant was staffed by the Department of the Treasury and the IRS Criminal Investigations Division, and it was all one big set-up.’
Cottrell had been under investigation by FinCEN for years. Cottrell routinely used the dark web and specialist software to communicate with the offshore banks and clients. Cottrell would provide a USB device to clients to access internet banking anonymously.
His bond hearing was set for the following Tuesday.
He was sent back to a maximum-security federal jail in Chicago where 80 per cent of the population was black, and most of the rest Hispanic or Asian. ‘I was the only white person there. And I’d been wearing a suit all my life,’ Cottrell recalls. ‘If I learnt anything from watching prison shows, it was don’t show any signs of weakness or you’ll be preyed upon.
Cottrell constantly espouses racist views and slurs, as he aligned himself with UKIP he would of associated himself with a white supremacist discriminatory prison gang.
‘My second cellmate was a notorious murderer and gangster in Chicago called Paris Poe. He was responsible for the murder of several people, including an FBI informant in front of his wife, six-year-old and four-year-old.’
Fortunately for Cottrell, he was ‘invisible to these gangsters because I had no gang affiliation’. He also needed to convince his fellow inmates that he was not a sex offender. ‘When I said I was charged with money-laundering, that was fine.’
Cottrell was denied bail. Over the months, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to gamble and ran up a poker debt with the boss of an Eastern European gang called Mafia Mitsu (Cottrell’s lawyers were able to send funds to clear the debt). Then, with help from his lawyers (funded by his family), he was moved to a maximum-security prison in Arizona. There, he and his lawyers finally received the court documents with all the evidence and charges.
Cottrell’s bank accounts are subject to civil forfeiture.
In the event, the evidence against Cottrell apparently didn’t add up. Of the 21 counts against him, 20 were dismissed after he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and was released at sentencing in March. While the IRS thought Cottrell was the banking linchpin of a drug cartel, it would appear that actually he was a young man making drunken claims in a Vegas restaurant. After eight months of incarceration, he was free.
Cottrell cooperated with the investigating federal agents and may be called to testify in future criminal or civil proceedings. Court documents relating to his cooperation are sealed, if Cottrell provided genuine information about his clients banking arrangements he could be entitled to a multi-million-dollar reward.
Looking back on his ordeal, how does he think Farage, his UKIP colleagues and his family regard his behaviour? There was, he says, ‘Utter shock and disbelief given how involved I was. Everybody stuck by me and supported me.’ He admits he was wrong not to report what ‘I knew to be serious criminal activity’; moreover, he was not licensed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to offer financial advice in the US, and admits to ‘enabling and promoting aggressive tax avoidance programmes. I built my reputation on integrity and absolute discretion. This episode has tarnished many people, not just myself.’
Cottrell has now been uncovered, he personally enabled the evasion of millions of dollars of tax revenue, laundered large fortunes for criminals and funnelled illegal donations to political campaigns. He has been discredited along with all his associates.
Cottrell admits he was foolish but claims that he has learnt much. ‘My youth and inexperience were ruthlessly exploited,’ he says. ‘It was truly humbling, and has undoubtedly made me stronger. [In prison] I read a huge amount of history and political books and I assisted other inmates with legal and tax advice by hosting an informal legal surgery.’
Cottrell was fully aware of his actions, his criminal career stretched over 5 years. Although Cottrell never graduated high school he operated at C-Suite level, he is no victim just a career fraudster.
He adds, ‘I interacted with a segment of society I ordinarily would have been oblivious to. Being incarcerated made me realise how privileged I have been all my life and, while I am grateful I never had a drug addiction, I finally realised that I had a gambling addiction that was almost as damaging.’ Cottrell says he eventually kicked the gambling habit in prison. What is he doing now for a living? Charitable work, he tells me.
Cottrell has stopped gambling because his bank accounts and assets have been seized pending forfeiture proceedings.
A year after the referendum poll, Cottrell attended a lavish anniversary party held at a mansion owned by Arron Banks outside Bristol. ‘The party was fantastic and despite my unfortunate adventure, and everything I went through, I still maintain 2016 was the best year of my life,’ he says. ‘Brexit and Trump. Nothing better.’
Cottrell has been welcomed back to the inner-circle so that Farage and Banks can make sure he didn’t disclose information about the illegal donations and kickbacks he funnelled to UKIP and Leave.EU respectively.
‘Had I not been to boarding school, prison would have been infinitely harder’
George Cottrell was a minor aristocrat, a UKIP fundraiser and member of Nigel Farage’s inner circle, a self-made millionaire and a compulsive gambler, all by the age of 23. And then US federal agents caught up with him… He tells William Cash about his spectacular fall from grace
Seated in a dark suit with a glass of claret in front of him at lunch recently in the Sydney Arms in Chelsea, George Cottrell describes the evening of 23 June 2016 as ‘the best night of my life – something I’ll never forget’.
On that day of the EU referendum poll, indeed throughout that overheated political summer, Cottrell had been in the ‘jump seat’ at Nigel Farage’s side, working as his aide-de-camp, gatekeeper and campaign fixer – from booking his helicopters to letting Simpson’s Tavern in the City know that Nigel was on the way for what he likes to call a ‘PFL’ (Proper F—ing Lunch).
At the age of just 23, Cottrell is accustomed to the high life: he’s the nephew of Lord Hesketh, the aristocratic former Tory minister and F1 racing-team owner, and his mother Fiona – once a Penthouse Pet of the Month – was romantically linked to Prince Charles in the late 1970s.
On referendum day, Cottrell decided that the best way for Farage’s inner entourage – including donor Arron Banks – to calm their nerves was a PFL at Zafferano, an Italian restaurant in Belgravia. Once the third bottle of chianti was opened, the mood improved. ‘We spent most of the time talking about what would happen if we lost, and Arron told me I was a pessimist and that we would win. But Nigel was pretty brooding throughout.’
However, when Sunderland voted for leave by a bigger than expected margin, Cottrell sensed a betting opportunity. ‘At 10pm, I couldn’t believe I was still getting 9/1 [for a majority leave vote],’ he says. ‘We were in our campaign office and I was tracking all the major stock indices, the dollar and pound currency markets. When it got to 3am, I was getting my managers out of bed to get me another 50 grand on here, another 50 grand there, to short sterling. I just couldn’t help myself.’
Cottrell won a six-figure sum that night but promptly ‘lost most of it the next day, on some horse running called Exit Europe or something like that. I was a compulsive, habitual, addicted gambler.’ Generous but self-effacing, with a sharp memory, Cottrell relates the events of that day and night with the self-assurance that the English public-school system produces – a chauffeur brought him to lunch, and only later did I realise he had bodyguards in attendance.
Just three weeks after the referendum vote, this appetite for high stakes nearly ended up with Cottrell gambling away two decades of his life to a maximum security US jail. Having attended the Republican convention in Cleveland in July, he was confronted by eight armed federal Inland Revenue Service (IRS) agents as he got off a plane in Chicago, with Nigel Farage just behind him. He was handcuffed and detained in a local federal jail. Back in Britain, ‘Posh George’ – as he is known within Farage’s inner circle – became big news: the Daily Mirror headline was ‘Farage aide faces 20 years for blackmail drug plot’.
Until now, Cottrell has given no interviews about what happened when he stepped off that plane in Chicago and disappeared for eight months into the bowels of the US justice system, holed up with gang leaders and murderers.
‘Prison life was fascinating and had I not have been to boarding school it would have been infinitely harder,’ says Cottrell. ‘I was housed in maximum-security facilities in Chicago and Arizona. I was placed with murderers, rapists, paedophiles, assassins, Isil terrorists, cartel kingpins and even a Mafia boss. I had to fight for my life on an almost daily basis. I still have fractured ribs today.’ Due to his case’s media profile, for the majority of his nine-month incarceration he was provided with his own cell.
George Cottrell
It was a bewildering fall for a the scion of a landed Yorkshire family. He was educated in Mustique followed by Malvern College, which he left aged 16 after being reprimanded for a gambling habit so bad that he was reading the Racing Post at 12 and betting illegally in bookies. Unsurprisingly, Cottrell says, he fell out with his family over the episode.
The habit at least gave him a head for numbers and complicated financial trades, and he was offered a job raising capital for a corporate finance house. This led to him, aged just 19, helping to set up a multibillion-pound private office in Mayfair for a well-known ‘international’ family. ‘I was the youngest person there by a long way,’ he says. ‘They took me under their wing, and I was taught the ropes, so to speak.’
He learned about the murky and complicated world of ‘shadow banking’, secret offshore accounts and sophisticated financial structures in such jurisdictions as Panama, Andorra and Switzerland. He did well, and was soon working as a London-based banker for an offshore private bank (which was under investigation by the US authorities as a ‘foreign financial institution of primary money-laundering concern’). It was these skills that landed Cottrell an unpaid role in 2016, running Nigel Farage’s private office at UKIP’s Mayfair headquarters and, in the run-up to the EU referendum, as a chief fundraiser for the party. The young Cottrell moved into Farage’s glass office and had ‘my Berry Bros wine collection stashed in the cabinet’.
His contribution? To ‘successfully raise millions’ during campaigning, and he says, ‘It was very important for [donors] to have face time with Nigel, and that’s where I came in. My role with fundraising meant that I was also looking after Nigel.’
Cottrell’s often reckless temperament may help to explain the unusually close bond between him and Farage. Did he view Nigel as a father figure?
‘Yes,’ replied George. ‘In many things. I mean, I still do.’
Did Farage know how bad his gambling problem had become? ‘Yes. It was out of control. I’d saunter to the William Hill round the corner with a Harvey Nichols bag with 50 grand in it, to have a bet on the 2.05 at Lingfield on a horse I knew nothing about. I was neglecting work, friends, family, girlfriends. It was all-consuming.’
How did it affect him when he lost?
‘It didn’t really. It happened so regularly’.
Despite the losses, Cottrell managed to maintain a millionaire lifestyle from the age of 18 to 21, with a concierge looking after him 24 hours a day. ‘I always managed to fund my gambling,’ he says. ‘Later on, I was earning millions and losing millions.’
His role at the offshore bank was to bring in new custom and he quickly learnt how private bankers did business with clients. ‘No business cards. No emails. Meetings in person. Lots of travel. Most of our correspondence was done by mail.’ And rule number one: never meet clients in the continental United States. ‘We were not licensed to operate there and we were under scrutiny,’ adds Cottrell.
The offshore ‘leading-edge tax solutions’ that Cottrell was putting in place were to maximise tax efficiency. They were not illegal, he claims. ‘We’re talking about people who have just completed an IPO [initial public offering], they’re about to receive hundreds of millions of dollars, and they needed the tax structures put in place and the offshore banking mechanisms to provide pension provision and the like.’
While working for the bank, Cottrell was contacted by two Arizona businessmen who wanted to sell their multimillion-dollar property portfolio and were interested in the services Cottrell’s bank could offer. They wanted to meet at the earliest possible convenience in America. ‘I checked with my boss and with compliance: that’s a no-no. I first said I couldn’t meet with them but while my more experienced colleagues weren’t willing to take the risks in North America, I was. The meeting was proposed to be in Las Vegas. And I can’t resist gambling.’
Cottrell flew to Vegas and met the two businessmen in their hotel suite. Dinner followed at ‘a great Michelin-star restaurant, and I get handed the wine list. I was 20 years old and hadn’t been ID’d. When the pudding arrived, one of the businessmen leaned in to the round marble table and said, “George, we’ve got something to tell you. We make about two and a half million a year trafficking cocaine from Phoenix to New York, in net profits.” So I say, “What about the property?” “Oh, we do have some.” I say, “Well, this is very interesting, what kind of margins are there on that?” Yeah, drunk me, asking a question.’
The meeting continued for another 10 minutes then Cottrell took the next flight back to London. ‘It was a very scary situation when you’re sitting in front of two people who have just represented that they’re trafficking millions of dollars’ worth of drugs on a regular basis,’ he recalls. ‘I knew that I had a duty to report their serious criminality. But a colleague said, “If you do report it, we’re going to be under the microscope. If they contact you again, then you report it.”’
Cottrell heard nothing. ‘I just put it down to a bad experience,’ he says.
That was back in 2014. It wasn’t until July 2016 that Cottrell stepped off that plane in Chicago and was placed under arrest. He had no idea why he was being charged. From jail, he was allowed to call the British embassy in Washington DC, who told him that the US State Department had just informed them that he had been arrested for ‘financial irregularities’. It was now 3am on Saturday morning and he was allowed one more call, to his parents in London, which ended swiftly when the phone went dead. He had no lawyer, no phone and still no idea what these ‘irregularities’ were.
On the eighth floor of a skyscraper federal prison in downtown Chicago, Cottrell was strip-searched, put into an orange jumpsuit and told to sleep on a metal bench, ahead of his court appearance the following day.
The next morning, he was transported to court in a police convoy. ‘I felt like I was a terrorist,’ he says. ‘I’m brought up in shackles and handcuffs, chained round my waist. And I walk into this courtroom, and a dishevelled lawyer hands me his card, and says, “Mr Cottrell, until you can arrange your own counsel, I’m a public defender. I’m going to be representing you.”’ The lawyer handed Cottrell an eight-page document in which George read that he was being charged on 21 counts including ‘conspiracy to commit money-laundering, money-laundering, wire fraud, mail fraud, blackmail and extortion. Penalties: 20 years, basically, each charge,’ he says.
Cottrell was later accused of using various banks under investigation to launder dirty money for drug cartels and other criminals, and also offering his offshore expertise on the dark web. George was to learn that the two businessmen he had met in Las Vegas were in fact IRS federal agents who were ‘all wired. The whole restaurant was staffed by the Department of the Treasury and the IRS Criminal Investigations Division, and it was all one big set-up.’
His bond hearing was set for the following Tuesday.
He was sent back to a maximum-security federal jail in Chicago where 80 per cent of the population was black, and most of the rest Hispanic or Asian. ‘I was the only white person there. And I’d been wearing a suit all my life,’ Cottrell recalls. ‘If I learnt anything from watching prison shows, it was don’t show any signs of weakness or you’ll be preyed upon.
‘My second cellmate was a notorious murderer and gangster in Chicago called Paris Poe. He was responsible for the murder of several people, including an FBI informant in front of his wife, six-year-old and four-year-old.’
Fortunately for Cottrell, he was ‘invisible to these gangsters because I had no gang affiliation’. He also needed to convince his fellow inmates that he was not a sex offender. ‘When I said I was charged with money-laundering, that was fine.’
Cottrell was denied bail. Over the months, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to gamble and ran up a poker debt with the boss of an Eastern European gang called Mafia Mitsu (Cottrell’s lawyers were able to send funds to clear the debt). Then, with help from his lawyers (funded by his family), he was moved to a maximum-security prison in Arizona. There, he and his lawyers finally received the court documents with all the evidence and charges.
In the event, the evidence against Cottrell apparently didn’t add up. Of the 21 counts against him, 20 were dismissed after he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and was released at sentencing in March. While the IRS thought Cottrell was the banking linchpin of a drug cartel, it would appear that actually he was a young man making drunken claims in a Vegas restaurant. After eight months of incarceration, he was free.
Looking back on his ordeal, how does he think Farage, his UKIP colleagues and his family regard his behaviour? There was, he says, ‘Utter shock and disbelief given how involved I was. Everybody stuck by me and supported me.’ He admits he was wrong not to report what ‘I knew to be serious criminal activity’; moreover, he was not licensed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to offer financial advice in the US, and admits to ‘enabling and promoting aggressive tax avoidance programmes. I built my reputation on integrity and absolute discretion. This episode has tarnished many people, not just myself.’
Cottrell admits he was foolish but claims that he has learnt much. ‘My youth and inexperience were ruthlessly exploited,’ he says. ‘It was truly humbling, and has undoubtedly made me stronger. [In prison] I read a huge amount of history and political books and I assisted other inmates with legal and tax advice by hosting an informal legal surgery.’
He adds, ‘I interacted with a segment of society I ordinarily would have been oblivious to. Being incarcerated made me realise how privileged I have been all my life and, while I am grateful I never had a drug addiction, I finally realised that I had a gambling addiction that was almost as damaging.’ Cottrell says he eventually kicked the gambling habit in prison. What is he doing now for a living? Charitable work, he tells me.
A year after the referendum poll, Cottrell attended a lavish anniversary party held at a mansion owned by Arron Banks outside Bristol. ‘The party was fantastic and despite my unfortunate adventure, and everything I went through, I still maintain 2016 was the best year of my life,’ he says. ‘Brexit and Trump. Nothing better.’
This blog is dedicated to exposing convicted criminal George Cottrell. Over the next weeks and months we will be publishing evidence detailing his extensive criminal activities.
Cottrell funneled impermissible donations to various Leave organizations during the United Kingdom’s EU Referendum in 2016.
Cottrell, on at least two occasions, arranged for a UKIP donation originating from Russia to be fronted by a permissible donor.
Cottrell, using cash, repeatedly incurred sizeable EU Referendum campaign expenditure personally to circumvent reporting requirements.
Cottrell cooperated with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in 2016 to receive a reduced sentence and collect a potential multi-million dollar “informant award” relating to federal income tax evasion that Cottrell facilitated.
Cottrell personally laundered hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty money on behalf of a transnational organized crime group.
Cottrell made a series of personal donations to UKIP that were not reported or declared.
Cottrell concealed certain account ultimate beneficial ownership information while working for Banca Privada d’Andorra, Loyal Bank and Moldindconbank.
Cottrell once worked as a fixer for a Roman Abramovich connected entity.
Cottrell, an habitual gambler, evaded income tax by purchasing casino chips from his offshore accounts before having friends redeem them for cash.
Cottrell is a Nigel Farage sycophant so much so that he placed £100,000 on him to win in the 2015 UK General Election.
Cottrell maintained a permanent room at the Dolder Grand Hotel in Zurich for the sole purpose of storing banking records and incorporation documents.
Cottrell’s £2.5 million Chelsea bachelor pad is owned by a non-existent British Virgin Islands entity.
Cottrell crashed, while driving under the influence, a £200,000 custom-built Range Rover outside Scott’s Restaurant, Mayfair and narrowly avoided prosecution.
Cottrell smuggled gold bullion from Balerna, Switzerland to a refinery in Bradford, England using NetJets.
Cottrell shared a Mayfair office with Scot Young – an alleged fixer for Russian organized crime.
Cottrell enabled and financed his girlfriends drug addiction immediately after she had left rehab.
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I gather this is just a part of the financial chaos Ukip is in with a number of its people claiming not to have been paid since June as the EU is demanding back money that was perloined from the tax payers, even Annabelle Fuller is bleating on Twitter, whether in her own name or one of her various aliases I didn’t bother checking as Ukip is becoming more of an irrelevance daily.
Ukip’s only allegedly consequential backer Arron Banks is reported in the media as lacking in income with sources drying up, it seems and Farage’s contacts who funded him seem to have left him dependent on his ureliable income as an entertainer on LBC.
Although I will post details of consequence regarding Ukip they have become something of an irrelevance, hence the slowdown of postings. It does rather look as if it is likely that having lost so many sources of income an article shortly may well announce that Ukip is in that legally parlous state of trading when knowingly bankrupt!
United Kingdom Independence Party Ukip loses access to multimillion EU funding scheme
Failure of anti- Brussels group to register follows series of scandals
Nigel Farage, Ukip MEP and former leader, has been hit by the failure to secure EU funds
by Michael Acton in Brussels
The UK Independence party and its anti-EU allies in Brussels have lost access to their biggest source of European campaign funding following a series of scandals over alleged misuse and misappropriation of funds.
After becoming insolvent in April, the Ukip-dominated pan-European Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe (ADDE) has now missed a deadline to register for EU funding, losing access to as much as €1.5m in 2018 alone, according to officials involved in the process.
The apparent demise of the ADDE and the loss of the funding will add to Ukip’s woes and will be a headache for the party’s new leader, Henry Bolton, its fourth in a year.
Ukip is wrestling with a weaker financial position at home as well as demands from Brussels for the ADDE to repay €172,655 allegedly misspent on national electioneering. U
kip and its European allies have denied any wrongdoing. European political parties, made up of coalitions of national parties and parliamentarians, have since 2004 been able to draw on an annual €30m pot of EU grants that can cover up to 85 per cent of party expenditure, including campaign costs for European elections.
This helped bankroll Ukip electioneering, and in past years the ADDE has used this route to receive more than €1m annually.
Roger Helmer, a former Ukip MEP, described drawing on the fund as “liberating” money from the EU. But since November, the ADDE has been embroiled in probes over how its EU support was used.
A European Parliament-appointed auditor found that almost €500,000 was inappropriately spent on national opinion polling and election campaigns in the UK and Belgium. The parliament demanded the ADDE repay €172,655. The auditor also found that almost €34,000 of funding had been wrongly claimed by the Initiative for Direct Democracy in Europe (IDDE), the ADDE’s political foundation. The ADDE has denied any wrongdoing.
The IDDE no longer has an obvious online presence and couldn’t be reached for comment.
Tighter funding rules are squeezing the support available to fringe parties in Europe.
Last year the European Parliament imposed conditions requiring applicants to have guarantees from a bank with an A1 credit rating, something the ADDE has been unable to secure. In March of this year, the party’s executive director Yasmine Dehaene resigned.
Other ADDE members include the Belgian People’s party, the Czech Party of Free Citizens, France’s Debout la France, Lithuania’s Order and Justice party, and the Swedish Democrats. All members will be cut off from EU funds.
Mischael Modrikamen, head of the Belgian People’s party, said the ADDE’s decline was a result of a politically motivated campaign against Eurosceptic groups. “There is a trend in the EU right now with a clear aim to defund all the parties that are opposed to the European project,” he said. “Since most of the ADDE’s funding comes from the EU budget, we were forced to put an end to activities. We decided we had no other choice than to appoint a liquidator.”
He said that some of the ADDE’s member parties may attempt to form a new party next year to regain access to funds. Eleven European political parties have successfully registered for the 2018 funding year, down from 16 in 2017.
It suggests the series of changes during the past three years have halted the proliferation of parties eligible for EU funding over the past decade, and have even started to reverse the trend.
The continuing controversy around party funding has highlighted wider questions about whether a top-down EU attempt to support and fund pan-European politics is realistic or desirable.
Pieter Cleppe, head of the Brussels office of think-tank Open Europe, said the rules were “opaque” and invited abuse. “Not only do people set up obscure schemes to obtain funds, it also enables the European Parliament to pick and choose who to go after, based on ideological preferences,” he said.
To view the original article eMailed to me CLICK HERE
Then a few days later & playing catch-up:
Poor Nigel Farage, what will he do without all those euros?
I wouldn’t say that Ukip’s approach to funding was slipshod….
Nigel, this is no laughing matter. Photograph: Sebastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images
Please brace yourself for the tragic news that Ukip has lost access to a major source of European Union campaign funding. Astonishingly, it involves a scandal over Ukip’s “misuse of money” and an element of Ukip incompetence.
It seems that the Ukip-dominated Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe (ADDE) became insolvent in April, after the EU parliament demanded that some funding be repaid after £500,000 was wrongly spent on EU referendum polling. ADDE has since missed the deadline to register for EU funding next year because it forgot to fill in the forms. Come on, we’ve all done it: it’s very easy to overlook such trifles as applying for funds that could total £1.5m.
Ukip still has access to loads-a-euros via Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy, of which Nigel Farage just happens, by sheer, crazy coincidence, to be president. However, does this adequately compensate for the human rights disaster of an anti-EU organisation not receiving EU funding because it was too thick and disorganised to apply on time? My fellow countrymen and women: who will march with me about this – and where’s Crowdfunder when you need it?
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Yesterday’s events Stateside may soon be causing ripples on this side of the North Atlantic, such is the involvement with several politicians, pundits and other sundry hangers-on with the Trump Gang. And one of those politicians now wondering if spending time in the USA might not be the good idea they once thought it to be is former UKIP Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage.
Squeaky indictment finger up the bum time
Farage had made great play of his wish to relocate to the States, claiming that he received so much hassle here in the UK, although this was probably code for “insufficient fawning adoration”. After Combover Crybaby Donald Trump’s idiot son Donald Junior admitted he and two other key Trump campaign figures had knowingly met with a Russian state-linked lawyer to get dirt on Hillary Clinton, the vultures are starting to circle.
Words like “Collusion” and even “Treason” are being openly used across the US media, and indeed on Capitol Hill. High ranking GOP representatives are beginning to break ranks. And all the while, the closeness of Mr Thirsty to this crowd is being pored over, especially by the likes of Carole Cadwalladr at the Observer, who was dismissed rather too eagerly as a “Tinfoil hatted journalist” by the Guido Fawkes rabble.
Since then, Zelo Street has pieced together more of the jigsaw, including the presence of several of the key figures in the list of “Golden Dolphin” awards made by the now-moribund Young Britons’ Foundation. Meanwhile, those in the Farage inner circle have become jumpy enough for one of them to suggest legal action to throw Ms Cadwalladr off the scent. We appear to be getting closer to Mr Thirsty’s personal endgame.
Ms Cadwalladr Tweeted yesterday “What *is* the story here? New photo of Farage emerges. With “Putin’s favourite congressman” & associate of Paul Manafort – @DanaRohrabacher”. A photo showed Farage and Rohrbacher on a fishing trip. Then she followed up with “Reminder of who @DonaldJTrumpJr forwarded that exciting email about the meeting with the Russians to”. Paul Manafort. Associate of Rohrbacher.
Then came the first giveaway: Arron Banks responded to one of Ms Cadwalladr’s Tweets, despite not having been tagged in it. “You are a person of interest to no one, Carole” he sneered, but despite there being no alleged interest, he tagged Andy Wigmore to be on the safe side. Wigmore deflected: “It’s pure fantasy”. Don’t worry. Look over there.
However, and here we encounter a potentially game changing however, Liz Bilney, who is the CEO of Leave EU, then leapt into the Twitter exchange – once again, without being tagged. “I’m interested to see if there’s a defamation claim … I will be looking very closely at @carolecadwalla” she warned. That really is a serious giveaway.
Carole Cadwalladr did no more than post a Tweet including a photo, and ask a question about it. Suddenly, Arron Banks is ostentatiously waving it away, and the Leave EU CEO is suggesting she’s going to get Lawyered up. But over what?
The thought enters that Nigel Farage could be in serious trouble – remember, he has not only the Trump connection, but the Assange one as well – and that those around him know the house may be about to fall in on them. More on this one later.
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JUNE 30, 2017 by: Cynthia O’Murchu and Henry
Mance
On the first anniversary of Britain’s vote to leave the EU, Nigel Farage put on his Union Jack shoes to attend a party at a stately home near Bristol. The owner of the house, Old Down Manor, is Arron Banks, a 51-year-old insurance entrepreneur who has emerged as Britain’s most prominent political donor, claiming that he invested nearly £9m in the run-up to the Brexit vote.
His guests drank champagne and cheered a replay of the television coverage of referendum night.
One Ukipper called him “King Arron”, while copies of his book The Bad Boys of Brexit were laid at each table setting. Mr Banks has promised to continue to shake up British politics, but a year after the vote, the extent of his wealth and his political intentions is unclear.
Even Old Down Manor is not all that might seem. It is not Mr Banks’ home; he runs it as a wedding venue, living in a modest farmhouse nearby. Old Down Manor Ltd, the holding company, had net liabilities in the most recent set of annual accounts available.
In 2015, Mr Banks told the FT that he was worth around £100m. This year he appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List for the first time, with an estimated net worth of £250m — much of it riding on the then expected planned flotation of Eldon, one of his insurance companies. But public filings covering Mr Banks’ business interests show the use of a range of accounting techniques that mask the value of his investments.
He is a shareholder in at least 20 UK registered companies according to Orbis, a company database. Almost all of their parent companies are offshore in the Isle of Man, Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands, affording them privacy.
His interests worldwide include insurance, banking, diamond mining and political consultancy. “I started my business with a desk and two phones, and built it from nothing. I earned and created every penny I made,” he said earlier this year.
Mr Banks built Group Direct, a motor insurer, from a small office above a bakery in Thornbury, Gloucestershire. In 2008, this business reversed into Brightside Group, which was listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market.
Mr. Banks and his wife say they made £10m from selling their shares in Brightside. He left in 2012, after a quarrel with his cofounders and two years after that, the company was sold to AnaCap, the private equity group, and became heavily lossmaking.
AnaCap has since sued its auditors, alleging “serious and widespread” failings at Brightside, including during Mr Banks’ tenure, though he is not a target of the suit.
In 2010 and 2011, Brightside paid Southern Rock Insurance — the Gibraltarbased underwriter in which Mr Banks is a major shareholder — £17m for a software platform and £32.4m for rights to distribute and sell motor insurance. But despite these sales, Southern Rock lost nearly £9m that year and by 2011 it was technically insolvent, without enough reserves to cover potential payouts.
The Gibraltar financial regulator ordered its directors to recapitalise the company. In the following years Mr Banks and his co-shareholders pumped money into Southern Rock and accepted a “period of ban or self-exclusion from other insurance directorships”. Mr Banks resigned as director of Eldon Insurance in Sept 2013 and Southern Rock in 2014.
Business remained difficult. Between 2010 and 2015, Southern Rock made multimillion losses on its core business in four of the six years.
In 2015, the most recent accounts available, Southern Rock posted a loss of nearly £28m on its core business. But it turned an overall profit by selling policy renewal rights for £73m to ICS Risk Solutions, an Isle of Man company that is majority owned by Mr Banks.
This allowed Southern Rock to book upfront profits from future earnings. I started my business with a desk and two phones, and built it from nothing. I earned and created every penny I made Mr Banks told the FT that Southern Rock was a “profitable, sustainable business in good standing” and that its finances could not easily be compared with other underwriting businesses because it also sold financial products.
Southern Rock had sold policy rights in order to meet solvency rules, he added. In the UK, Mr Banks’ insurance group’s main businesses — Eldon Insurance and Rock Services — work closely with Southern Rock, as extensive related-party disclosures show.
A page from Rock Services Ltd’s 2015 accounts showing ‘related party’ disclosures Eldon operates the motor insurance brand GoSkippy, and prominently advertises on the website of Leave.EU, Mr Banks’ pro- Brexit campaign group.
The company’s profitability is difficult to assess because of its high administrative expenses, which closely track turnover.
In 2015, it achieved a profit of just £284,000 on a turnover of £33.6m while paying £33.4m in administrative expenses. It received a £3,000 UK tax credit.
A page from Eldon’s 2015 accounts.
The company’s profitability is difficult to assess because of its high administrative expenses, which closely track turnover In the same year, it sold £25.7m of services to Southern Rock Insurance in Gibraltar and bought £27.5m of services from Rock Services, a UK company, of which Mr Banks is a director.
Through his lawyers, Mr Banks said a £250m valuation of Eldon Insurance was “speculative”, but that it could be justified because Eldon’s earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation were forecast internally to rise to £20m.
He also said that there were no plans to float Eldon Insurance Services, although he subsequently told the FT that a flotation could take place “maybe next year”.
The FT has contacted Mr Banks’ holding companies in the Isle of Man, to obtain its annual accounts, but had not had a response at the time of publication.
Mr Banks has diversified his holdings. Over the years he built stakes in an offshore bank, a provider of trustees to high net worth individuals, and — through Southern Rock Insurance — even uranium mining in Niger.
More recently, he has taken shares in a sports consultancy. His charity, Love Saves the Day, claims to provide grants in the Commonwealth including Lesotho and Belize. Established in 2014, and registered with the Charity Commission in June 2014, its most recent accounts — which cover the period to May 2016 — show no income received and no grants made.
One of the charity’s founding trustees was suspended in March this year by the UK’s solicitor regulation authority for one year, for in effect facilitating money laundering into Belize by a third party. “When it was brought to our attention she was being investigated in the UK we stopped using her”, a spokesman for Mr Banks said, adding that Mr Banks made a lot of donations personally outside of the charity “depending on the request”.
It is also unclear how much Mr Banks actually spent on Brexit. He provided money to Leave.EU in the form a £6m loan — he says to avoid inheritance tax. Leave.EU’s first annual accounts, show that as of September 2016 that loan — which is due to be repaid at the end of this year — was still outstanding.
Meanwhile his Better for the Country Ltd — which donated nearly £2m to Grassroots Out — another Brexit campaign group — is owed £1.3m by related parties, and owes £2m to related parties.
This article has been amended to show that Eldon Insurance received a tax credit in 2015.
This article was sent to me as a .pdf – From The FT
There would seem to be many anomalies regarding Banks’ accounts, as have been shown repeatedly on this web site, as you will have noticed.
I am also interested in any information that anyone can supply regarding the financial background etc. of Robert William Parks who would seem to be an accountant or book keeper of some sort.
Also the actual ownership of:
53, Elysten St., Chelsea.
Any properties assetts and corporate info & banking data of:
Thorn In The Side Ltd.
SEEMINGLY involved in the purchase/ownership of properties in:
St. Troupe (or nearby)
& Tuscany.
With regard to property it would be of value to have the correct address & lease details of the property in Washington that it was announced Banks had leased for his and Farage’s use. Which of Banks’ companies actually pay the bills or are they paid from elsewhere! It would also be interesting to know if the FBI/CIA/NSA investigation had something to do with their now infrequent, if ever, visits to Washington. I gather the inquiries are largely concluded with interestintg material leading to the study of connections and relationships, hence the delay in any action!
How Julian Assange received the memory stick which it is understood contained private eMails of Hillary Clinton, and if that was the memory stick who obtained it and was it in fact supplied by Russian sources and who delivered it to him!
There is also interest in a Russian named Mogleivitch and if or what connections he may have with Banks, his Russian wife and/or Nigel Farage.
Similarly the connection with the art collector, yacht & commercial plane owner Dimitry Rybolovlev a Russian olygarch living in Monaco. His meeting(s) with members of Donald Trump’s team particularly in Dubrovnic are also of some interest
On that subject details of the relationship between Jarred Kushner, Dubrovnic & Rybolovlev would be of help.
You may wish to consider also further details regarding the apparently parlous finances of Arron (sometimes Aron) Fraser Andrew BANKS – something of a roundup to 28-Feb-2017CLICK HERE also see HERE & HERE
If you have any information on these issues it would be appreciated and will be treated as from confidential sources, for your safety, but as with all information I publish it will require provenance.
Many thanks to the veritable army of individuals and media who have supplied me with so much material, particularly as I would wish to ensure that BreXit was of British making and not in any way financed or puppet mastered by Putin, Russia or corruption – some of those involved and their associations with Ukip, Farage, Banks, Batten and the very dubious behaviour of both the Metropolitan and West Midlands Police would seem to leave much to be desired as far as I can so far ascertain!
Regards,
Greg_L-W.
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I didn’t notice Paul Nuttall’s claim that he had mastered walking on the spot when he was teaching Michael Jackson how to ‘Moon Walk’ during the time he took off from studying for his Doctorate (everyone else ‘reads’ for the qualification of Professor!), presumably that was before he was a professional footballer for Tranmere Rovers but after he had managed the crowd control of Hillsboro – or was this just another claim that when he was shown to have lied about it he blamed it on a junior employee, after it being on his web site for many years!
Then it was on to Stoke where he hadn’t a clue where he lived and slept at night, claiming to have a house in the constituency (that seemingly he had seen in an Estate Agent’s window) – but that Michael Crick viewed and filmed as empty and to let!
Then on to the present constituency he has been parachuted into as a carpet bagger, at the last minute, where it became abundantly clear in a TV interview he didn’t seem to know any of the main land marks in the constituency, couldn’t name them and didn’t even know they were in the constituency.
This fooish little chap made a fool of himself on his web site, showed he was a fool in Stoke and is proving to be a fool in this election too – not content with that he has led people to believe he is also a liar and a cheat.
Oh so very Ukip!
Having become a laughing stock in the Stoke by-election, the most winnable seat for Ukip in Britain as a result of the hard work Nikki Sinclaire put in promoting a pro BreXit vote in the Referendum she was directly responsible for instigating with the petition she organised after she left Ukip. The petition Nigel Farage’s Ukip party tried to sabotage to avoid the Referendum it gave rise to and the probability Ukip would be out of a job once the electorate knew the truth and voted for BreXit.
Well that was one thing Nigel Farage got right, before he jumped ship to avoid humiliation in domestic politics yet again.
It is noteworthy that despite Nigel Farage’s £800 a session job waffling for LBC, his highly paid job for Fox News in America, regular income from Russia via his work for RT, his free house in Chelsea, his young French ‘house Mate’, his funding by Arron Banks sourced from seemingly dubious sources and the near £1/4M he accrues as an MEP and he’s still leading Ukip in the EU. Plus of course the additional income and further monies he controls as leader of an EU Group and of course money he trousers, which runs to 10s of £1,000s, in Court cases related to his job!
Nigel Farage has left the party; that served him so well over 20 years, in a total mess; leaderless and with no structure, he never managed to create a viable structure and we all know why
he really was terrified of anyone of competence being in a position to challenge him and his control of the purse strings. Just look at the long list of MEPs elected under the Ukip banner that have quit the party due to fraud, corruption or having clashed with Nigel Farage and then add the many competent individuals who quit because Farage feared their competence see CLICK HERE.
Nigel Farage sowed the seeds of Ukip’s failure by his utter lack of leadership skills, but he did teach this clown who has replaced him one thing: Never accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong and surround yourself with nobodies you can blame!
Now we all know, that with BreXit moving forward under Theresa May’s management, Ukip is
GOING NOWHERE?
Paul Nuttall’s attempt at looking serious goes wrong as Ukip video appears to show him walking on the spot
Ukip leader appears to be bobbing up and down in cringe-worthy party political broadcast
By Tom Gillespie
12th May 2017,6:54 pm
Updated: 13th May 2017,7:49 am
UKIP leader Paul Nuttall might struggle to convince voters he can not only “talk the talk” but “walk the walk” – after starring in a hilarious party political broadcast that appears to show him walking on the spot.
Paul Nuttall is leading Ukip through a period when their very existence is seemingly hanging in the balance
Once Nuttall’s “walk of shame” is over he places his hands on top of a wall and stares out across the sea as a voiceover says: “Who’s looking after you, and who really does put our country first?”
A cutaway then appears to show the shambolic Ukipper in London as he says: “We want to cut immigration, we want a more secure Britain, we want to prioritise the NHS over foreign aid, we want to protect British culture, and we want a modern and fair democracy.”
It is not clear where Nuttall took his seafront stroll but he is running to be an MP in the coastal town of Boston and Skegness in the General Election on June 8.
Twitter user Ross Fairbairn wrote: “Is it me or is Paul Nuttall just walking on the spot in the UKIP party political broadcast? Hahaha.”
I try to make every effort to NOT infringe copyrights in any commercial way & make all corrections of fact brought to my attention by an identifiable individual
so it looks as if theThe Infighting has moves up a gear in Ukip with an over threat by Nigel Farage, who is still clearly the defacto leader of Ukip, to his puppet placement Paul_Nuttall that ‘if his long term supporter and bagman Paul Nuttall fails to achieve what Nigel Farage himself failed to do in 23 years, mostly in leadership or with puppets like Roger Knapmann, Malcolm Pearson and the like – Paul Nuttall is finished’.
Nigel Farage is threatening Paul Nuttall with the boot if he fails to get MPs elected to Westminster when he stood himself 7 times and never came anywhere near election and the only GE achievement was to have the Tory defector Douglas Carswell hang onto his Tory support as an MP who was Ukip by name but NEVER toed the Ukip line.
After Paul Nuttall’s humiliating defeat in Stoke how can you expect to get this sad little man with his faux CV and implusible claims to lead anything much more complex than a rubber duck on a string around a bath!
So Paul Nuttall has effectively been given his marching orders boots and all – what then? Will Nigel Farage, who is still Ukip’s leader in the EU and effective leader on a defacto basis in the UK be returning as leader or will it just be an embarrassing list of nebishes – I have a feeling Tiny Tim Farron will be looking for a job too so perhaps he will consider leading Ukip for a few weeks as a succession of others have!
Already Ukip’s candidates for the May election are reduced by at least half relative to the last time and just who do they have who has the stature or competence to be an MP? They are bereft of leadership, have no backer or even backers of any note and have a bunch of largely squabbling clowns as MEPs – I should also remind you that they are still under investigation over 100s of £1,000s of fraudulently squandered public money – possibly even £Millions by both OLAF and now I understand the British authorities, corrupt as they have been proven to be in the past, relative to Ukip, are also investigating.
I gather Ukip is under suspicion of links to Russian funding and there is even talk that they may well be involved with Trump staff not just in Russian funding but also under investigation relative to the Rico Act – The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as the RICO Act or simply RICO, is a United States federal law!
I do tend to believe that Paul Nuttall is not alone in being way out of his depth!
Nigel Farage piles the pressure on Ukip leader Paul Nuttall by giving him just SIX WEEKS to prove himself – or face being booted out the top job
Mr Farage said the General Election will be a verdict on the party’s leadership
His warning comes after a period of bitter in-fighting and electoral flops in Ukip
Mr Nutall has said the party hopes to win a handful of sets on June 8
UKip could be on its fourth leader in a year if Mr Nuttall is ousted
Published: 09:53, 20 April 2017 | Updated: 10:35, 20 April 2017
Nigel Farage has piled the pressure on Ukip leader Paul Nuttall by warning he has six weeks to ‘prove himself’ in the top job or face being booted out.
The MEP said he would ‘work closely’ with and ‘support fully’ the man who holds his old job, but warned the General Election would be a verdict on his leadership.
It means the crisis-hit party could get its fourth leader in less than a year if Mr Nuttall fails to make good on his pledge to win a ‘handful’ of seats in the June 8 election.
+3
Nigel Farage has warned that Paul Nuttall has just six weeks to prove himself as Ukip leader or face being ousted form the top job
And Mr Farage said he is still deciding whether to run for Parliament for an eighth time.
Asked about his verdict on Mr Nuttall’s leadership, told BBC’s Radio 4’s Today programme this morning: ‘He’s got six weeks to prove himself, hasn’t he?’
He added: ‘Paul has walked into this job and I guess he’s probably been shocked at how tough it is.
‘But he now realises exactly what he’s facing and I think he’ll come through very strongly.’
Mr Nuttall has faced fierce criticism amid bitter in-fighting in his party.
He was left personally humiliated when he failed to be elected to the ‘Brexit capital’ of Stoke-on-Trent earlier this year after running a scandal-hit campaign.
Meanwhile, Mr Farage said he is still mulling over whether to stand again in South Thanet when Britain goes to the polls this summer.
But he insisted that he would win if he threw his hat in the ring, saying:’I think I would, yes,’
He said he will make up his mind in the next couple of days.
Mr Farage has been making the most of his time since stepping down as Ukip leader. As well as striking up a close friendship with US President Donald Trump he has been posting holiday snaps, including this one of him catching Bluefin Tuna in the Adriatic Sea
He said: ‘I haven’t decided yet. I have got to weigh it up.
‘I’m still leading a group in the European Parliament where, of course, ultimately there will be a veto over the whole Brexit deal and where the negotiations will take place over the next two years and I’ve got to weigh up where am I best to be in terms of having an impact on Brexit and perhaps warning the British public that it’s not going in the direction it should be.’
Mr Farage suggested he lost in South Thanet in 2015 ‘perhaps in circumstances that weren’t entirely fair but we’ll let the Crown Prosecution Service decide about that’ following claims the Conservatives breached election spending limits.
The CPS is said to be considering bringing charges against 30 people over the elections expenses scandal.
The former Ukip leader insisted voters should back his party to ensure there was a ‘strong’ voice holding Theresa May to account.
‘This Prime Minister gives fabulous speeches,’ he said. ‘She uses words and phrases that I have been using and have been condemned for 20 years.
‘It all sounds wonderful. When she was home secretary, remember, she was going to reduce immigration. Did she? Not a bit of it.’
Ukip is fourth in the polls, lagging behind the Lib Dems. Leader Paul Nuttall says he wants to win a handful of seats in the vote
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