Arron Banks is married to, now separated from, a Russian woman named Katya. Around 2000, Katya (née Paderina) was
close to an MP named Mike Hancock, who reportedly helped resolve her immigration status and find an apartment after her first marriage broke up. A member of Parliament’s defense select committee and chair of a parliamentary Russia group, Hancock was warned by Britain’s security service MI5 that he was a target for Russian intelligence operatives. In a nugget of information that came to light during an immigration tribunal in 2011, the Home Office had attempted to remove permission to stay in Britain of a young Russian woman, Katia Zatuliveter, who’d had a four-year affair with Hancock and had been identified by the intelligence services as a Russian agent and national security threat.
It is a testimony to the British way of doing things that due process was followed so impeccably. The Home Office made a case that Zatuliveter, then twenty-six, who’d previously had a relationship with a senior NATO official, had set out to seduce Hancock, sixty-five. Oleg Gordievksy, a former KGB colonel,
described her to one newspaper as the “most useful KGB agent for thirty years,” but a judge found the relationship to be “enduring and genuine.” In his ruling, Justice Mitting wrote: “We cannot exclude the possibility that we have been gulled—but if we have been, it has been by a supremely competent and rigorously trained operative.”
In a long interview
I conducted with Arron Banks back in March 2017, it was he who brought the subject up, joking about Katya being “a spy.” Did you know about her past, I asked him. He shook his head. “First I knew was a front-page story in the
Mail!” he said. It was during the Zatuliveter trial, before Banks became a figure on the national stage; a business associate had rung him up, he told me, and said, “You’d better sit down.”
After the Zatuliveter business, Banks bought Katya a
personalized plate for her car, X MI5 SPY, a classic Banksian ploy. He is a jovial figure, with a fondness for a drink, and, like Nigel Farage, trades on an image of himself as what Britons call a “good bloke.”
It was at the same interview Banks told me about his “boozy” lunch with the Russian ambassador in the months before the referendum. In
The Bad Boys of Brexit, he noted that it was a rip-roaring affair in which they put away bottle after bottle, first of vodka and then of brandy. In our interview, it was two lunches, not one. And then he added, a minute later, “Not a single penny of Russian money went into Brexit.” In the resulting piece, I noted this was “a perfectly reasonable answer, if he had been asked if Russia had put money into Brexit. But he hadn’t. He asked and answered his own question.
There was something else he said to me. Banks’s business interests, besides insurance, included diamond mines in Lesotho and South Africa, as well as a jewelry shop in Bristol, and again, this was something Banks brought up, unprompted. Lefties are always “triggered” by diamonds, he claimed. This is from my transcript of the interview:
CC: Well, the argument is that diamond mines are the perfect vehicle for money-laundering because you own the entire flipping supply chain! So you own it from mine to shop, and you just throw some extra diamonds in.
AB: But that’s pure speculation.
CC: Yeah, it is pure speculation.
AB: (Laughs) You haven’t got a clue if that’s true or not.
It’s true. I didn’t. And still don’t. And Banks denies any allegations. All his wealth, he says, was generated in Britain, and it was his company, Rock Services, that made the Leave.EU donation.
For two years, a tiny group of journalists has pursued the trail of crumbs over the financing of the Leave.EU campaign. The question of where the money came from that paid for Brexit did not add up. The independent website
Open Democracyhas plugged away at Banks’s business interests. Cynthia O’Murchu on the
Financial Times has examined his insurance company. A former Metropolitan Police officer turned crowdfunded journalist,
James Patrick, and
Wendy Siegelman, a citizen journalist in the US, have tried to untangle the Lesotho connection.
And I wrote articles and columns, and sparred with Banks on Twitter, often late at night. About the number of lunches he’d had with the Russian ambassador. About his diamonds. About why, if he’s so rich, he lets out the manor house in which he claims to reside for weddings and lives in a cottage down the road. About why he and Nigel Farage
had gotten involvedwith “Calexit,” a plan for California to secede from the union. About Farage’s relationship with Dana Rohrabacher, the representative from California who, until he just lost re-election,
was known as “Putin’s favorite congressman.” About what Farage was doing when
he visited Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy in early 2017.
In November 2017, the story took a darker turn. The Russian embassy wrote to call me a “
bad journalist,” and Banks’s and Wigmore’s tone changed from laddish banter to a coarse threat of violence. They posted a spoof video that had my face Photoshopped into a scene from the film
Airplane. A queue of people lined up to belt me over the head. The last passenger had a gun.
The new hostility was perhaps not only the result of our reporting. The timing may have been coincidental but what had also changed were the first indictments from Robert Mueller’s prosecutors, revealing a web of ties that ran through London, including the identification of the Russian ambassador as a contact between the Trump campaign and Moscow. It was via the London connection that Mueller claimed its first scalp, thanks to George Papadopoulos meeting with an Australian diplomat in a Kensington wine bar.
London: the city that Bill Browder, the US-born British businessman who has been pursuing a global Magnitsky Act, says is irredeemably polluted by Russian money. Among London’s Russian “residents” is the sanctioned Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska—just one of a whole class of oligarchs who’ve mixed with British politicians and donated to British politics and who are now in Robert Mueller’s sights as an associate of Paul Manafort, the Special Counsel’s leading conviction so far; just last week, Deripaska
was revealed to have been shuttling Konstantin Kliminik, a suspected Russian intelligence agent, also charged by Mueller, around the world in his jet.
It was in London, too, that the voter data of some 230 million US citizens was processed by Cambridge Analytica. In March, its servers were seized in a
high-profile raid by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is now co-operating with the FBI. And in London that “Organisation 1” is based—the name the Mueller investigation
has apparently given Wikileaks in its explanation of the Russian military intelligence operation to subvert the US presidential election.
We know that the release of the Clinton campaign’s emails was a defining moment in changing the course of the election. We know Mueller is following the data trail for evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian disinformation. And we know he’s circling Assange’s contacts: Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, and Ted Malloch, another friend and associate of Nigel Farage, are all pieces of the puzzle. We know that American intelligence must be working with British intelligence on this. On the movements in and out of the Ecuadoran embassy. On the movements in and out of the Russian embassy, as detailed in the first indictment. We know that Mueller has talked, repeatedly, to Bannon. We know that he is asking questions about Farage.
Yet the implications for Britain of Mueller’s indictments have barely been reported, let alone understood, in the UK. Theresa May must have been briefed on all this. She knows. She’s just not telling.
Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
Wigmore and Banks arriving to give evidence to a parliamentary committee, London, June 12, 2018
