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Reform UK has received the most donations of any political party by far so far this year according to data released on Thursday by the Electoral Commission.

Over the last quarter Reform UK was the biggest recipient of political donations out of any UK political party by a long way. At a total of £10,293,511, Reform received almost four times the donations of Labour (£2,190,340) and more than twice those of the Conservatives (£4,662,110).

Although Reform had reportedly been struggling to raise funds earlier this year, the £10.2 million takes them one quarter of the way to their stated goal of a £40 million war chest to prepare for the next general election.

Donors to Reform included £490,000 across two donations from the party's treasurer and billionaire property developer Nick Candy. Candy has been charged by the party with the task of leveraging his contacts and experience to fundraise. Earlier this year Candy told the Financial Times that there were several billionaires waiting in the wings to join Reform. At the time, Reform's intake of donations seemed lacklustre and it was reported that they were struggling to fundraise.

One Conservative source told the FT in July that "people would have expected Reform to eat our lunch, but it just hasn't happened", however Reform has now managed to leapfrog the Conservatives in financial terms.

The £10.2 million figure, and the discrepancy between Reform's donations and those of the Conservatives, highlights Reform's increasing dominance over the right-wing of British politics despite having just five MPs.

Crypto Investor Donates £9 Million to Reform UK as Nigel Farage Plugs His Company and Tells Industry 'I Am Your Champion'

The Reform leader recently used media interviews to back Christopher Harborne's company while promising to cut taxes and regulations on crypto firms

Adam Bienkov

Reform received donations from several ultra-high-net-worth individuals, including former Tory donors, that unlike Candy are not formally part of the party.

The most controversial of these was a £9 million donation from Christopher Harbourne, a businessman who has invested heavily in the cryptocurrency firm Tether. The company has recently come under fire for allegedly being used for money-laundering and sanctions evasion in Russia.

According to the Guardian, The National Crime Agency has spent the past four years investigating a multibillion-dollar scheme that exchanges cash from drug and gun sales in the UK for crypto, with the "vast majority" of funds seized by the NCA and others being issued by Tether.

The scheme has enabled "sanctions evasions and the highest levels of organised crime, including providing money-laundering services to the Russian state", the agency has said.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Harborne.

It was Harbourne that paid £28,000 for Farage to attend Trump's inauguration in January. Farage has recently been courting the cryptocurrency sector, promising he will be their "champion". Harbourne also has interests in aviation fuel and the defence firm QinetiQ.

Other donations included 130,000 from Bassim Haidar, a fintech and telecoms magnate who once advised Amnesty International and the World Economic Forum both of which Farage has railed against. Haidar, a former Conservative donor, has pledged to donate £1 million to Reform.

He gave a further £225,000 of these pledged funds between January and April this year. Haidar told the Telegraph in 2024 that he had "left" Britain and lamented that Labour's abolition of the non-dom tax regime had rendered the country "no longer interesting" for wealthy investors. However, he remains listed at his One Hyde Park flat address in London, meaning he continues to be eligible to donate to the party.

In a sign that right-wing media magnates are also increasingly backing Reform UK, the party also took £50,000 from ...

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For two decades, Jeffrey Epstein moved through the private networks that shaped modern Silicon Valley — even after his sex-offending conviction.

Newly released House Oversight Committee files, combined with a deep review of archived material, reveal how his money, ideas and relationships flowed into the founders, labs and political circles now defining America's new tech order.

Part One of this exclusive three-part investigation explores how Epstein was embedded in the Silicon Valley 'Broligarchy' brains trust. Part Two uncovers how Epstein intersected with pivotal moments in Bitcoin. Part Three, the channelling of an apocalyptic vision of climate 'culling' and eugenics.

Jeffrey Epstein's ties to Silicon Valley did not break after his conviction. As we revealed in part one of this investigation, through the Edge Foundation – a private forum that functioned as a kind of inner brain-trust for the founders of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tesla and others – years after being jailed for soliciting a child, he remained in circulation among the architects of the digital age, now among the biggest donors to Donald Trump.

But the newly released documents point to a deeper story. The Edge Foundation was not just a talk-shop. For Epstein, it was a route to influence the direction of Silicon Valley, AI, Big Tech and cryptocurrency at their most pivotal period. One of the most crucial moments of impact was on Bitcoin, the world's most recognised, valuable and widely used cryptocurrency.

At the very moment Bitcoin's future was in jeopardy, Epstein's money and access placed him inside the institutions that were beginning to frame the cryptocurrency as a tool to route around nation states – and consolidate power among a new class of networked tech elites.

One of them was billionaire tech magnate Peter Thiel, who not only operated in Trump's inner circle during his first term, but has massively expanded his influence on the second Trump administration, with more than a dozen people closely connected to him now folded into it.

MIT Media Lab and the Fight for Bitcoin's Future

In 2012 Joichi (Joi) Ito – Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab – delivered a webinar to the Edge network. Ito had been a member of the Edge Foundation since 1999 when he first attended and dined with Jeffrey Epstein.

By 2013, Ito began concertedly inserting Epstein into MIT circles despite him being "disqualified" in the university's donor database, telling colleagues that Epstein had been fully vetted. A key figure at this time was the co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, who sat on Ito's MIT Media Lab advisory council. Ito turned to Hoffman to help manage Epstein's relationship with the Media Lab – arranging to meet both men on campus to discuss fundraising.

Hoffman and Ito have since apologised for their connection to Epstein.

Between 2013 and 2017, Epstein donated $525,000 to the Media Lab. Other MIT recipients aligned with the Edge network had already benefitted from his money – including £100,000 to AI pioneer Marvin Minsky in 2002 and $225,000 to the quantum physicist Seth Lloyd.

In April 2015, Byline Times can reveal from the House Oversight corpus, Ito forwarded Epstein an internal summary of a major shift underway in Bitcoin's governance. Its core code was maintained by "five core developers" and around a hundred contributors, Ito explained to Epstein – but "only the five core developers decide what changes are made to the core code". The Bitcoin Foundation, which had financed the project's infrastructure, had just imploded. The collapse came at a pivotal moment: Bitcoin's next upgrades would determine whether it became a global monetary platform or remained a niche experiment.

Into that vacuum, Ito wrote, the Media Lab had "moved quickly", persuading three of the five programmer...

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The UK Government's plans to house asylum seekers at two military sites have been delayed following opposition from affected Labour MPs, campaigners and local people.

Last month the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood announced that she would bring two military sites - Cameron Barracks in Inverness and Crowborough army training camp in East Sussex - into use.

The Home Office said it would move 900 people into the sites by the end of this year as part of its plans to close asylum hotels, amid far-right protests and disorder.

However, sources in the department have told Byline Times that local Labour MPs have refused to look at military sites in their constituencies, with one saying that they do not want to further inflame tensions within local communities. Sources added that there is also "an obvious tension" between the Home Office, which leads on asylum accommodation strategy, and the Ministry of Defence, which owns the sites.

In opposition, Keir Starmer had opposed housing asylum seekers on military sites as being costly and "inhuman", with the then opposition leader accusing the Conservative Government of "lurching from one ridiculous proposition to the next".

Crypto Investor Donates £9 Million to Reform UK as Nigel Farage Plugs His Company and Tells Industry 'I Am Your Champion'

The Reform leader recently used media interviews to back Christopher Harborne's company while promising to cut taxes and regulations on crypto firms

Adam Bienkov

Despite pushing similar schemes in opposition, some local Conservative MPs have also resisted the current plans.

On Monday Nus Ghani, Conservative MP for Sussex Weald, met with Defence Minister Luke Pollard to raise her concerns regarding the security of the Crowborough site and her "lack of confidence in the Home Office and Wealden District Council in ensuring the site is safe, legal and compliant." Pollard confirmed that the site will not be operational until at least the start of 2026.

Liberal Democrat MP Angus Macdonald also described the Government's decision to house 300 asylum seekers at Cameron barracks in Inverness as "odd". Moving asylum seekers from hotels in the city centre to the training camp, which is also in the city centre, was "effectively the same thing", he said.

False Economies

Starmer's Government hopes that moving people away from hotels in town centres to barracks, which tend to be in less populated areas, will save money and deescalate local community tensions.

But experts suggest that the use of military sites will exceed those of hotels. A report from the National Audit Office last year found that barracks would be £46 million more expensive than hotels over a decade.

In October the Home Affairs Select Committee said that the Home Office had "squandered billions" of pounds of taxpayer's money on a "failed, chaotic and expensive system" with "flawed contracts" and "incompetent delivery".

Campaigners fear that the use of military sites is a "sleeper issue", which could cause significant tensions with local communities, similar to the riots and protests outside asylum hotels last summer and earlier this year.

"Our attention should absolutely be on planned use of large sites," said Lou Calvey, executive director of charity Asylum Matters. "We know that warehousing vulnerable people without legal access or medical care won't do anything to solve the problems in the system. It doesn't reduce the costs - in fact it increases them. They need to be speeding up processing, not whacking a load of people on a bit of land in the middle of nowhere."

In addition to military sites, the Home Office is looking at a range of alternative accommodation options, including student halls, pre-fabricated portacabins and Nightingale hospitals used during the Covid pandemic.

The Government already houses asylum seekers on two military sites in England. Wet...

A Thailand-based crypto investor and former Conservative donor has handed a record-breaking £9 million to Reform UK, as its leader Nigel Farage backed his company and called for deregulation of the currency, telling an industry conference earlier this year that "I am your champion".

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British-born Christopher Harbone previously funded Farage's attendance at Donald Trump's second inauguration, donated more than £13 million to the Brexit Party and was a key backer of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

He is also a key investor in the crypto firm Tether, dealing in Stablecoins. His £9 million donation to Reform, made in August and reported by the Electoral Commision on Thursday, is the largest ever by a living UK donor.

Farage used an appearance on LBC's Nick Ferrari show in September to back Harborne's company, saying that Tether, "is about to be valued as a $500 billion company" and urged the UK to "embrace" it and become a "global trading centre" in Stablecoin.

Boris Johnson and Alexander Lebedev Must Be Investigated in a New Public Inquiry into Russian Influence

If you think the Gill conviction is bad, linking the Reform UK Party leader's closest aide to the Kremlin, wait till you hear about another Leave campaigner and his connections to Putin's inner circle

Peter Jukes

The Reform leader's promotion of the crypto industry and Tether came one day after Bloomberg reported that the firm was seeking to raise up to $20 billion in order to value the El Salvador-based firm at around $500 billion.

Farage also used his LBC appearance to accuse the Bank of England of being "dinosaurs" for seeking to place restrictions on the use of the Stablecoins used by Tether.

"The Governor of the Bank of England earlier this week indicated that nobody, no individual, should be allowed to have more than £10,000 pounds worth of stablecoins, to which some of my friends have said, 'should we just emigrate'?" he said.

Farage did not state which friends he was referring to, nor did he declare the financial interest of his biggest single political donor.

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday Farage said that he did speak to Harborne regularly but that he wants "absolutely nothing in return" for his donation.

The Reform leader told the Digital Asset Summit in London in October that he plans to create a state-owned bitcoin reserve and bring forward a crypto bill deregulating the industry, including slashing taxes on the sector.

"When it comes to your industry, when it comes to growth in this industry, then I am your champion," he told the conference.

"We will effectively bring crypto in from the cold."

Reform UK is the first political party to accept crypto donations.

Byline Times reported earlier this year on growing concerns that a loophole in UK electoral law could allow parties to large sums in anonymous donations via cryptocurrencies, potentially allowing breaches of laws banning foreign funding of political parties.

Reports this week suggest that Keir Starmer's Government is considering banning all such donations.

Democracy campaigners said that Harborne's donation to Reform raised the need for a cap on donations.

"This record-breaking donation shows how dependent our political parties have become on a super-rich few," Rose Zussman, Senior Policy Manager at Transparency International UK said.

"When single donations reach these extraordinary levels, it reinforces the public's belief that money talks loudest in the corridors of power.

"The Government has promised to protect democracy by strengthening the rules on political finance. If ministers don't want our democracy sold to the highest bidder they should introduce a cap on how much anyone can give annually."

Daily Mail Owner's Wife Donates £50,000 to Reform

The latest donation figures show that Reform also received £50,000 from the wife of the Daily Mail's ...

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For two decades, Jeffrey Epstein moved through the private networks that shaped modern Silicon Valley — even after his sex-offending conviction.

Newly released House Oversight Committee files, combined with a deep review of archived material, reveal how his money, ideas and relationships flowed into the founders, labs and political circles now defining America's new tech order.

Part One of this exclusive three-part investigation explores how Epstein was embedded in the Silicon Valley 'Broligarchy' brains trust. Part Two uncovers how Epstein intersected with pivotal moments in Bitcoin. Part Three, the channelling of an apocalyptic vision of climate 'culling' and eugenics.

In December 2011, three years after pleading guilty to soliciting a child, Jeffrey Epstein appeared on a confidential email chain alongside the men who would define the 21st century: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Bill Gates.

Today, those same figures exert enormous strategic influence on Donald Trump's Government.

Jeffrey Epstein's conviction in 2008 should have severed him from every elite network he once courted. The federal investigation into his serial abuse of dozens of underage girls was one of the most disturbing sex-crime cases of the era. Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting a girl aged 14 for prostitution, registered as a sex offender, and served 13 months in jail under a work-release arrangement so lax it became a national scandal.

Yet Epstein did not disappear.

Epstein Inside Silicon Valley's Inner Brain-Trust

On 14 December 2011, acclaimed literary agent John Brockman sent a confidential invitation to a select group of technologists as part of his Edge Foundation annual salon – an intellectual ritual that had come to function as the private thinking-room of Silicon Valley's ruling class.

The recipients of his email – as revealed in the corpus of Epstein communications released by the House Oversight Committee – included the architects of modern technology and global power:

Founders

Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon

Sergey Brin – co-founder of Google

Steve Case – co-founder of AOL

Bill Gates – co-founder of Microsoft

Elon Musk – Tesla/SpaceX, now X

Pierre Omidyar – founder of eBay

Larry Page – co-founder of Google

Evan Williams – co-founder of Twitter

Mark Zuckerberg – co-founder of Facebook

Big Tech Executives

Salar Kamangar – then-CEO of YouTube

Marissa Mayer – then-senior Google exec, later Yahoo CEO

Peter Norvig – Director of Research at Google

Eric Schmidt – then executive chairman of Google

Billionaire Investors & Power Brokers

Paul Allen – co-founder of Microsoft

John Doerr – leading Silicon Valley VC (Kleiner Perkins)

Vinod Khosla – billionaire venture capitalist, founder Sun Microsystems

Nathan Myhrvold – former Microsoft CTO, co-founder of Intellectual Ventures

Scientists, Engineers & Cultural Figures

Tony Fadell – iPod designer, Nest founder

Danny Hillis – AI pioneer, founder of Thinking Machines

Maja Hoffmann – art philanthropist (LUMA Foundation)

Bill Joy – co-founder of Sun Microsystems

Dean Kamen – inventor (e.g. Segway), robotics/engineering

Hubert Burda – German media mogul

The full list of recipients and its implications for Silicon Valley's inner circle are reported here for the first time.

Between them, these figures built and now control the core infrastructure of the modern digital world – from search, cloud computing and social media to online retail, AI research and the information ecosystem surrounding Donald Trump.

Brockman had invited them to send in responses to a big question: "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?"

Recognisably included on this confidential distribution list was Jeffrey Epstein, who responded to Brockman:

"Mathematics ideals are universal truths, biology is intrinsically based in deception. Predators in sear...

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David Lammy's plans to scrap the automatic right to appeal risks increasing miscarriages of justice and will remove "vital safeguards" against unfair trials for vulnerable defendants, lawyers and campaigners have warned.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Tuesday, the Justice Secretary said that he will limit appeals from the magistrates courts to the Crown Court "to prevent justice from being delayed further". The change means defendants who are convicted by volunteer magistrates will not have the automatic right to have their case re-heard at the Crown Court.

The latest proposals on appeal rights form part of sweeping reforms outlined this week, which aim to reduce the unprecedented backlog of cases in the criminal courts. In his statement to MPs, Lammy described an "emergency in our courts", where 78,000 cases are currently awaiting trial across England and Wales. The caseload is expected to reach 100,000 by 2028.

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If you think the Gill conviction is bad, linking the Reform UK Party leader's closest aide to the Kremlin, wait till you hear about another Leave campaigner and his connections to Putin's inner circle

Peter Jukes

Lammy's package of measures will see cuts to thousands of jury trials in all but the most serious cases, including murder. Judges alone will decide the majority of crimes currently before Crown Courts, such as theft, drugs, fraud and violent and sexual offences. A tier of judge-only "swift" courts will be established to hear cases without a jury.

Magistrates courts will also see an increase in powers, dealing with maximum sentences of at least eighteen months. Most cases - around 90% - are currently heard by magistrates, but the number of volunteers in England and Wales has dropped significantly in recent years, from over 30,000 in 2010 to 14,636 in April 2025.

The Justice Secretary's plans were met with criticism from MPs in the House of Commons, with Stella Creasy warning that "it's hard to see how this will address the backlog" and Labour MP Karl Turner describing the move as a "massive mistake".

The proposal to remove automatic appeals rights follows a review of the criminal courts by the retired judge Sir Brian Leveson. In the first stage report, published in July, Leveson recommended that the automatic right to appeal should be replaced with a requirement for the defendant to apply for permission to appeal. Leveson also recommended that the government should remove the requirement for a re-hearing in the Crown Court.

According to Leveson, 41% of defendants who appealed against their conviction were allowed. The latest figures show that nearly half (44%) of those pursuing an appeal against their sentence were upheld.

"Removing the automatic right to appeal will make it infinitely more difficult for people to access justice," said Nicholas Jennaway, criminal solicitor at Bindmans.

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"The proposals are likely to lead to more errors and will remove a vital safeguard for defendants to appeal their conviction, which is extremely concerning. This seems to be about making speedy decisions rather than delivering justice."

Fiona Rutherford, Chief Executive of law reform charity JUSTICE, said: "The Government's announcement raises more questions than it answers. There is no evidence that scrapping the automatic right to appeal or curtailing ...

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The disgraced former Prince, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is entitled to nearly £500,000 compensation for the early termination of his lease on Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, but is unlikely to get a penny because of the dilapidation of the property, according to a letter released by the Crown Estate to MPs today.

Andrew lost his titles and the use of his home after King Charles decided continual disclosures about his longstanding association with the deceased paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was damaging the reputation of the Royal Family.

He has until the end of October next year to leave the property according to the terms of the lease. He would have been entitled to £488,342.21 but the letter states that the deterioration of the property means he is unlikely to get any money.

The lease, which was released to MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, shows that the 100 acre estate, as well as the main house, includes a front gate lodge, six other lodge gates, a gardener's cottage, a police lodge for the Royal Protection Squad, a chapel lodge and a miniature cottage.

The disclosure has led the Conservative chairman of the committee, Sir Geofrey Clinton -Brown, to decided to hold an inquiry into the Crown Estate and its relationship with the Royal Family.

Boris Johnson and Alexander Lebedev Must Be Investigated in a New Public Inquiry into Russian Influence

If you think the Gill conviction is bad, linking the Reform UK Party leader's closest aide to the Kremlin, wait till you hear about another Leave campaigner and his connections to Putin's inner circle

Peter Jukes

The lease made the former prince responsible for all the repairs to the properties and to maintain orchards and woodland.

Miscellaneous provisions under the lease banned auctions, public shows or spectacles and political meetings on the premises. It also banned gambling, betting or wagering on the site. Placards on building were banned and a clause added the premises should not be used for " any illegal or immoral purposes."

It discloses that the notional rent in 2002 would have been £260,000 a year but after the former prince agreed to spend £7.5 million on repairs it was reduced to a peppercorn rent which may not have been collected.

The letter says a meeting to discuss the surrender of the lease and a preliminary inspection of the property was held on November 12 - a fortnight after the King made the announcement.

Following questions from MPs, the Crown Estate has also released details of other properties occupied by the Royals in Windsor Great Park.

The Prince and Princess of Wales have signed a 20 year lease on Forest Lodge in July this year and intend to use it as their primary residence. It is being let at market rate rents, set by estate agents Hamptons and Savills.

Rachel Reeves and the Daily Mailification of the BBC

For all the focus on its supposed "left wing bias", the BBC's heavy coverage of Conservative allegations of dishonesty against Rachel Reeves shows how its political coverage is still largely led by the right-wing press

Adam Bienkov

Prince Edward, now the Duke of Edinburgh, initially leased Bagshot Park, in 1998 for 50 years at an initial rent of £90,000 a year. He spent £1,380,000 towards renovations and the Crown Estate spent £1.6 million on repairs. In 2007 the lease was negotiated for 150 years at a premium of another £5 million.

Princess Alexandra and her family have leased Thatched Cottage Lodge in the park since 1971. The lease was renegotiated in 1995 for £670,000 with a fixed rent of £1010 a year for the first 25 years rising to £6000 for the last 25 years.

Andrew Mountabtten Windsor also leased two cottages on the Sunninghill Park near the Windsor Estate. One has been surrendered, the other, which is let to a member of his staff, has not been surre...

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Nationalist vigilante 'street patrol' groups with ties to Reform UK and the far right are falsely claiming to be working with the police, while seeking to infiltrate local school networks in order to "protect" women and children, Byline Times can reveal.

Earlier this year we revealed how one such group, the Essex Spartans had been seeking to recruit "boots on the ground" for its "volunteer service protecting vulnerable residents, particularly women, children, and the elderly".

The group is based in Epping, near the scene of this year's far right protests over the hosting of asylum seekers at the Bell Hotel. They claim to be a local grassroots organisation, but in reality have ties to senior far-right figures across the UK, with its founder having a history of extreme racist and Islamophobic views, including expressing a desire to "start my own rebellion" in order to "kick all" Muslim people out of the country.

The group's social media profiles carry pictures of its uniformed members touring the streets in stab proof vests, and in one case carrying handcuffs, in order to "protect" local women and children, in claimed "partnership" with the police.

However, the local council and local police deny any involvement with the group.

Since our earlier reporting on the group, a number of other connected groups have sprung up both in Essex and elsewhere in the country, claiming to be "collaborating" with the Essex Spartans.

Offering what can be defined as "concierge nationalism" these groups advertise walk-you-home escorts, street patrols, SOS apps and premium mentorship through QR codes and subscription models.

However, in recent months their activity has escalated into an attempt to infiltrate local school networks, prompting serious safeguarding concerns.

Enemies at the Gates

Documents seen by Byline Times show that the Essex Spartans contacted at least one educational trust responsible for several schools in Epping Forest. They introduced themselves as a new "Community Interest Group" claiming to work with police to make local streets safer.

The services they offered included patrols around schools at drop-off and collection times, meetings with school leaders, and information letters for parents. They described members as being DBS checked, uniformed, carrying ID badges, and using a QR code system linking calls directly to police. The trust declined the offer.

The group's founder Jack Golding has claimed to be working "in partnership with Essex police".

However, the police have denied any connection to the group. Chief Superintendent Leighton Hammett of Essex Police told Byline Times: "While we are aware of this group, we are not affiliated with them, we do not endorse or promote their activity, and we do not work with them.

This directly contradicts the group's claims.

Councillor Joel Charles, Harlow Council's Cabinet Member for Public Protection, told local news site Your Harlow: "It is not normal practice for an organisation, not known to the council, to start patrolling the town. Members of the council's community safety team already carry out a significant amount of community engagement work and join patrols with police officers in known crime hotspot areas.

"Volunteers representing Essex Spartans have recently been approaching vulnerable people in the town. Anyone feeling unsafe, in a state of distress or facing the prospect of being homeless can access advice and support from official sources."

An Extremist History

Essex Spartans claim their members are DBS checked. However, the only evidence offered is a Facebook montage of certificates that lack official seals and reference numbers. The group also admits that not all members hold Security Industry Authority (SIA) licences, saying only licensed members may carry handcuffs. UK law ...

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Reposted from Peter Jukes' narrative project, Trojan Horses: Trump, Russia, Brexit

With the news that a poll to call for a public inquiry has reached a sufficient number to be considered for a parliamentary debate, we might be inching closer to a full reckoning with the extensive 'active measures' and hybrid economic information war Vladimir Putin has waged against the UK since 2012.

The 10-and-a-half year prison sentence Nathan Gill, former UKIP and Brexit Party MEP and Welsh Leader of Reform UK, for taking Kremlin-linked bribes, has turned an intelligence concern into a criminal conviction - and activated a live constitutional question.

Nigel Farage's wingman in Strasbourg accepted around £40,000 to push pro-Kremlin lines in the European Parliament. One of Gill's bribes was to organise a roundtable for 'Putin's Man in Ukraine', Viktor Medvedchuk, who was also the ultimate payee of the Kremlin gold. This puts Nigel Farage firmly in the frame, directly linking one of his top aides to one of Vladimir Putin's.

EXCLUSIVE

Nathan Gill Sentenced: What He Was Really Doing for the Kremlin

Reform UK's former leader in Wales was in the centre of Putin's preparations to attack Ukraine, argues Sergei Cristo

Sergei Cristo

In a statement, Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey called Gill "a traitor … at the very top of Reform UK, aiding and abetting a foreign adversary" and branded Farage's party "a danger to national security".

But if you think this is bad, consider our former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the troubling high-level Russian connections he had over many years.

Brexit and Blaming the Victim

As well as being the figureheads of their respective Brexit campaigns, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson share another thing in common: as Russia launched its first phase of war against Ukraine in 2014, they both blamed the EU for the conflict.

Back at the time of the Crimea land-grab, in March 2014, Farage told the press and the European Parliament that the EU had "poked the Russian bear with a stick" by encouraging Ukrainians to topple President Viktor Yanukovych, accusing Brussels of a "militarist and expansionist" policy that had provoked the crisis in Ukraine.

Nathan Gill echoed his leader's defence of Putin a few months later, in his maiden speech to the European Parliament in September 2014, warning that an association agreement between Ukraine and the EU would "lead to war", and insisting that "what you are doing today is throwing petrol onto the bonfire which the EU lit".

Nigel Farage went on to head the Leave.EU campaign a year later.

The other leading leave campaigner, Boris Johnson, directly echoed this two years later. In May 2016, he told reporters that "if you want an example of EU foreign policy-making on the hoof, and the EU's pretensions to running a defence policy that have caused real trouble, then look at what has happened in Ukraine".

How did it come about that both leading Brexiters were also Putin cheerleaders?

From Nalobin to Farage: the long Russian courtship of the Tory right

Carole Cadwalladr and I have documented in the award-winning Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, how the Kremlin was trying to suborn the Conservative Party and UKIP long before Gill was taking envelopes of cash from Medvedchuk's bagman.

In late 2010, Russian-born Tory activist Sergei Cristo says he was approached at the Carlton Club by Sergey Nalobin, a first secretary at the Russian embassy and son of a KGB/FSB general, with an offer that Russian companies that would like to "contribute to the Conservative Party". An illegal act, like Gill's bungs.

Just as interestingly, Nalobin quizzed Cristo about the rivalry between the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his former Eton, Oxford and Bullingdon Club contemporary, the then Mayor of London, Boris ...

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The Faena Miami Beach hotel gets thousands of five-star reviews online. It is arguably the most luxurious hotel in the city - certainly up there with the Miami Beach Edition. So, if you were the US Representative for Florida's 13th congressional district and in town on the weekend of 25 October this year, looking for a Russian businessman sanctioned by the US Government for his links to the Kremlin, the Faena was the place to be.

It was also where Donald Trump's personally appointed peace envoy walked in with business ties to the very Kremlin-linked financial networks he was supposed to be negotiating against.

The Envoy who Walked in With Two Hidden Conflicts

Byline Times can reveal that Steve Witkoff entered this meeting carrying two conflicts of interest: his real estate empire has been financed, in part, by a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin's right-hand man on money and investment; and several of his Florida and New York developments have drawn on investment vehicles linked to post-Soviet networks now intertwined with Russia's political elite.

These financial entanglements starkly contradict the narrative that Witkoff's apparent willingness to support Moscow's position stems from inexperience. Long before he picked up the phone to Kremlin officials, he was already moving through business circles shaped by the same interests he was now claiming to mediate.

In fact, as long ago as 2011, the Kremlin's sovereign investment fund had recruited a Wall Street billionaire close to Trump as an adviser - and the same financier's firm later became one of Jared Kushner's biggest lenders, providing hundreds of millions of dollars for prime New York properties. Years before the current "peace plan" emerged, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner and a Kremlin-backed fund were already moving in a shared financial orbit.

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Inside the Faena Meeting and the 28-Point 'Peace' Plan

At the Faena in October, Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) - the Kremlin's sovereign investment vehicle - was joined by President Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and, Jared Kushner. The choice of venue was doubtless a good one - it is a self-proclaimed "exclusive sanctuary", defined by "decadent design, luxe amenities, and legendary hospitality."

It also happens to be co-owned by a close business associate of Steve Witkoff's: the Ukrainian-born, British and American citizen billionaire Len Blavatnik, whose fortune grew out of post-Soviet deals with one of Vladimir Putin's closest oligarch allies. Blavatnik was sanctioned by the Ukrainian Government in 2023.

These men were meeting at the Faena to finalise a 28-point peace plan for ending the war that the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, launched in Ukraine. Soon after the meeting, the plan landed like a FAB-3000 glide bomb on the international diplomatic community, prompting the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to warn on television: "Now, Ukraine can face a very difficult choice - either losing dignity or risk losing a major partner."

The Back-Channel Calls to Moscow

It has since emerged that, ten days before the Faena meeting, Witkoff held a call with President Putin's senior foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, on 14 October. A leaked transcript published by Bloomberg shows Trump's envoy coaching the Kremlin aide on how to pitch a "Gaza-style" peace plan to President Trump and reassuring him that Trump would give him "space and discretion" to get a de...