How Nigel Farage’s ‘right-hand man’ in Europe was unmasked as a traitor

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, how Nigel Farage's right-hand man in Europe was unmasked as a traitor.

0:23It was a few weeks before Christmas in 2018, and one of Nigel Farage's colleagues was giving a speech in the European Parliament. Mr President, there should be three things that all of us on all sides of this House can agree on. One, we all stand by the Ukraine and we support its sovereignty and its territorial integrity. This is Nathan Gill, a Mormon bishop who went on to represent Wales, first for UKIP, Farage's original party, then for the Brexit party, and most recently he led Reform UK in Wales. If you weren't paying attention, the speech sounded innocuous. Boring even. Let's just say he's not the most naturally gifted orator.

1:10Ukraine's citizens must enjoy freedom and be respected. He began with a few platitudes about freedom of the press in Ukraine. Or the Ukraine, as he put it. And he expressed sympathy for the people of Crimea, who'd been under Russian occupation since 2014. I have every sympathy with Ukraine when it comes to the Crimea, when it comes to Russian aggression and interference. And then, in his own mild-mannered way, he stuck the boot into the Ukrainian government. But as surely as you can't fight fire with fire, it is wrong to fight repression with repression. We've seen activists and journalists alike being violently attacked by radicals with little, if any, reaction or protection from the Ukrainian government.

2:05The Ukrainian government is in the process of banning the two biggest TV channels in the country, he said. Channel 112 and News 1. And proper democratic procedures are being ignored. Four months before an election. How can this be? Hardly any other MEPs were in the hall to listen. Back at home in the UK, no one really paid any attention. And yet this speech, and a few others, have just landed Nathan Gill a ten and a half year jail sentence.

2:40From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. How a Mormon bishop joined Nigel Farage's political crusade and ended up in the dock at the Old Bailey.

2:56Luke Harding, welcome back to Today in Focus. You're a senior foreign correspondent at The Guardian and also a former Russia correspondent. And you're talking to us today from Kiev, where you've been reporting from regularly since the Russian invasion, as well as before, actually. You don't normally get involved in UK politics, but this is a notable exception for reasons that will become very clear. So can you just start with the basics? Who is Nathan Gill? Nathan Gill is an exceptionally tall Welsh politician for UKIP when it was UKIP and then subsequently for reform. I think we can say he was a key ally, lieutenant of Nigel Farage's in Wales.

3:36He ran the party there. And between 2014 and 2020, he was an MEP. Before that, I suppose you could call him a businessman, rather a disastrous businessman who ran a care home company that went bust in 2008 and wound up with debts of about£116 ,000. And probably the other interesting fact about him is that he's a Mormon. He was a Mormon bishop. He had theological ambitions, I suppose we could say. But I mean, all of that is kind of irrelevant, because I think he's going to be famous for one other thing he did in his political career. And how did he get involved in politics and with Nigel Farage.

4:12He stood several times to be a local candidate in Wales. He didn't do terribly well. And then actually his fortunes changed in 2014 amid a sort of general electoral rise of UKIP, of these sort of Eurosceptic forces in the years before the 2016 referendum. And there was a gap on the party list. And he was number one on the Welsh UKIP party list. And of course, he was elected in 2014 when UKIP did really very well. And suddenly having failed to kind of get lift off, there he was in Brussels and Strasbourg as a paid, elected, salaried representative of a British political party. And during that period, of course, Nigel Farage was also serving as a member of the European Parliament.

4:55And he spent most of his time essentially baiting the Europeans in Brussels, calling Herman Van Rompuy, saying he had the sort of the charisma of a dirty dishcloth or a damp dishcloth, I think he said. What kind of politician was Gill? I didn't know him then, but I've looked at some of his videos and he makes speeches or he reads speeches like a speak your weight machine. I mean, really devoid of charisma or colour or gravitas. There is a reason for that, that we subsequently discovered. But he was part of a kind of lively, noisy, contrarian, Eurosceptic outfit within the European Parliament. I mean, Farage obviously was the most famous example.

5:35And what do we know about the relationship between Nathan Gill and Nigel Farage at the European Parliament? Well, I mean, the relationship between Gill and Farage is contested. I mean, Farage more or less gave the impression that they scarcely knew each other, that they were acquaintances. Yes, they were in the same party, but no more than that. But I think my colleague, Ben Quinn, who's been investigating this, has talked to people around Farage, who suggests that actually they were pretty close, that they campaigned together. Their offices in Brussels were kind of next to each other. So they knew each other, they were co-strugglers.

6:07And actually, when it came to Ukraine, which looms large in this story, during this period, they were saying the same things. I have to say, the same essentially pro-Russian things. And you mentioned the reporting by our colleague Ben Quinn. Somebody told Ben that Gil was Farage's enforcer and right-hand man. So it wasn't just that they knew each other, but that Gil had a sort of pivotal role in terms of Farage's operation over there in Brussels. I mean, I think that's right. And also Gil then segued from UKIP to reform. So I think he was a sort of key person. Probably he didn't have much of a national profile, but he had a kind of international profile.

6:47And of course, the forces that he represented, these Eurosceptic forces, were of interest to other external actors.

7:04And so the period that we are really concerned with is 2018 to 2019. And this was a period when Gill was still serving in the European Parliament. But by this point, he was no longer a UKIP MEP, he defected to the Brexit Party, which of course was another vehicle of Nigel Farage. And he seems to have got himself into bother after a trip to Ukraine in October 2018. And what do we know about this trip? There were several trips to Ukraine. There was a previous one in May of 2018, when he went to Dnipro to attend a kind of May Day parade commemorating the end of the Second World War, which is a very, it's a very Soviet and now very kind of Russian, very kind of Putin thing.

7:47So he went to that. And then he came back in October with two other Brexit party MEPs, David Coburn and Jonathan Arnott. And it was really a sort of political mission to champion TV channels belonging to a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch called Viktor Medvedchuk. And Medvedchuk is important because he was really Putin's chief interlocutor in Ukraine. If Putin wanted to know about Ukraine, he would call Medvedchuk. And it was Medvedchuk who essentially was trying to kind of bring down the Ukrainian government and replace it with a sort of pro-Russian alternative. At that point, using classic techniques, including having TV channels, one called 112 Ukraine, the other called News One, which Nathan Gill and his fellow MEPs sort of championed and supported.

8:34So they were supporting these channels. And meanwhile, the Ukrainian authorities were trying to close them down because they were pro-Russian. So Gill and the other UKIP MEPs go to Ukraine to champion these pro-Russian TV channels. And they give these channels interviews and they then return to Brussels and fight their corner. Why? The card that Nathan Gill was playing was sort of freedom of speech, saying that this is a freedom of speech issue and these channels should be allowed. What Nathan Gill does back in Brussels is that he makes several speeches about Ukraine, a country obviously he's visited, but where he has no special expertise.

9:10I mean, he doesn't speak Ukrainian, he doesn't speak Russian, he doesn't have a background in East European studies. But he stands up and reads rather metronomically a speech decrying attempts to shut these Ukrainian pro-Russian channels and talking about freedom of speech, saying the European Parliament has to believe in freedom of speech. And he also at one point he uses the word radicals to describe Ukrainian supporters of Ukraine, which, again, it rather echoes Russian rhetoric. I don't think anyone was really paying attention. They didn't really kind of clock this. The government of the Ukraine must ensure that these principles are sacrosanct.

9:49And that means allowing TV stations to broadcast whether you like the message or not. You know, the curious thing was that this Mormon bishop from Wales or this former bishop from Wales was spending an awful lot of time talking about Ukraine, talking about its domestic politics, freedom of speech, etc. And also using vocabulary, which strikes me as rather strange. I mean, what one tell is he always refers to the Ukraine rather than Ukraine. And actually, that's really important because everybody in Ukraine calls it Ukraine. the Ukraine is transliterating the Russian version, la Ukraine, into English.

10:30So he talks about the Ukraine and the Crimea. And this was odd. I mean, why would he care? Very weird. But what you have to understand is that when all this was happening, Russia had already seized Crimea and started a covert war in the east of the country, in Donetsk and Luhansk. And Ukrainian soldiers were dying there most days. It wasn't the kind of all-out war that we see now, But to work for or give interviews to a pro-Russian channel in a time of war is obviously controversial. And for the Ukrainian authorities, these channels were just simply unacceptable. Very curious. And who else did Nathan Gill meet while he was in Ukraine?

11:05Nathan Gill's trip was organised by someone called Oleg Voloshin. Now, Voloshin, I mean, Voloshin is someone I've known for a long time. I met him when he was press attache at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow in 2008, when he just arrived as a young Ukrainian diplomat. And I find him rather beguiling. Really? He was charming. He was clever. He spoke English, really good English, extremely fast. I mean, sometimes I burble, but he was even more burblesome than me. Sure enough, he became the director of information, basically the spokesman for the Ukrainian foreign ministry, reinvented himself as an active supporter, as a journalist, then as a political analyst of Viktor Medvedchuk.

11:48In other words, the most pro-Russian politician in Ukraine. And he made no secret about this. He basically said, my views are the views of many Ukrainians. It's democratic. We need friendship with Russia, and so on. And I would see him in Kyiv. Whenever I visited, we would go and have lunch or we would chat. And over the years, he went from wearing polyester suits and cheap shoes to looking like a minor English aristocrat in designer tweed and quite fancy shoes with tassels on them. And at this point, he's reinvented himself as a journalist. Well, he was a journalist. He became a diplomat. He reverted to journalism.

12:27And of course, he was working for 112 Ukraine and for News One, basically very much in this pro-Russian an informational space at a time where having those views was becoming harder and harder and harder as the war in the East continued and people died. You know, you said that when you met him in Moscow, he was working as an attaché. And anybody who's worked as a foreign correspondent knows that you meet people at an embassy and they're some sort of mysterious attaché. And that's sort of often code word for spy. Did you think that he was some kind of spy at that point? I think I didn't. I mean, possibly for reasons of naivety, but also because he told me stuff.

13:07I mean, he told me stuff which was quite useful. I basically regarded him as a source rather than a spy. I mean, subsequently I changed my view before this Nathan Gill scandal. So just to recap, the three main characters that we need to remember here are Nathan Gill. He is the Eurosceptic Welsh MEP. Then there is Oleg Voloshin. He's the maybe spy who's working as a journalist for this pro-Russia channel 112 Ukraine. 112 Ukraine is owned by Medvedchuk. He is the Ukrainian oligarch with ties to Putin. So Nathan Gill makes a couple of trips to Ukraine in 2018. And on at least one of those, he meets Oleg Voloshin.

13:45And basically Voloshin recruited Nathan Gill and actually David Coburn as well to sit on what he rather grandly titled an international board to defend 112 Ukraine from attempts by the Ukrainian government to shut it down. But additionally, from time to time, Voloshin gets Gil to give comments to 112 Ukraine about the issues of the day, about Viktor Medvedchuk and the persecution that he is suffering. I'm very concerned to hear that the criminal prosecution services have opened up this investigation against somebody who is a politician and who possibly will be standing in future elections. Is this a way of quieting down Victor Medvedchuk?

14:27Is it a way of actually silencing his views? Because in the West... And also, we now know that Gill sub-recruits a couple of other MEPs who've not been named, who similarly make comments to the TV station. And then these, of course, are shown back in Ukraine and presented as European concern at authoritarian heavy handed behaviour by the Ukrainian government. Right. These are kind of useful statements for the TV channel to collect. And basically, whenever a bit like a kind of loyal dog, you know, whenever the whistle comes from Voloshin, Gil sits up with his with his paws extended and barks in the correct way.

15:13So Gill remains an MEP until the 31st of January 2020, which Nigel Farage dubbed Freedom Day. That is the day that the UK officially left the EU. And then what does Gill do next? Gill tries to sort of stay with Farage, I think, and briefly kind of joins the new Reform Party and continue his career in politics. He was briefly the leader of Reform UK in Wales. The problem is that this all comes crashing down the following year in 2021 when Oleg Voloshin, who enjoys international travel, makes the mistake of flying to America and is stopped in Washington, D.C. by the FBI, who grill him for three hours about his activities.

15:54And more importantly, they swipe his phone. We can't say this definitively, but my assumption, it's a working assumption, is that they go through his chats and find his WhatsApp conversations. And at that point, whoever from the FBI is looking at this material, their eyebrows go up. And within Within a few weeks, I think a transcript of this conversation is shared with the Metropolitan Police in London. And pretty soon after that, in the autumn of 2021, Gil is himself stopped en route to Moscow, by the way, for a conference on crypto. And he is detained. And at that point, I think his world comes crashing down.

16:33His career was on a kind of upward rise up until the moment the counterterrorism police stopped him. He is stopped at Manchester Airport on the 13th of September 2021. And they search his devices, they search his home. And what do they find? They find that basically he's been taking bribes from Voloshan. And these chats, as summarised by the Crown Prosecution Service, suggest that Voloshan was paying Gil pretty frequently. Every time he made a speech or recruited MEPs to appear on 112 Ukraine or did something helpful to Medvedchuk, he was getting payments of£4 ,000 or£5 ,000. and not only that, but this was all done in a kind of code.

17:15I mean, you didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out the code because Voloshan would talk about Christmas presents, postcards, it was sort of circumlocutory, but basically that meant money. And Voloshan was also writing his speeches. So the fact that Gil kept on talking about the Ukraine rather than Ukraine was because that's what Voloshan had written. He'd just transliterated from the Russian and then Voloshan merrily read it out and no one was any the wiser. So he was giving him talking points. He was drafting his speeches. He was paying him red gold. For much of this period, he was actually really working for people closely connected to the Russian state and its intelligence agencies.

17:53And police obviously questioned Gil at the time of his arrest about these messages between him and Voloshin. Who is Oleg Voloshin? No comment. And how long have you known Oleg Voloshin? No comment. But ultimately, they, the police and the CPS were not convinced. They were pretty convinced that he'd taken bribes and he was charged with eight counts of bribery. Fast forward to late September this year. It's finally Nathan Gill's day in court. What happens? Well, what happens is he pleads guilty. For me, that's the most compelling piece of evidence. I think on some level he acknowledges that what he did was wrong.

18:30I think basically his political career is over, but it should be a huge scandal.

18:43Nathan Gill, you were elected to the European Parliament to represent Wales, serving from the 1st of July 2014. So Luke, on Friday, Nathan Gill was finally sentenced at the Old Bailey. What happened? What happened was that he got a thumpingly long sentence of 10 and a half years. I think it's fair to say that was at the upper end of expectations. I think a couple of factors explain his long sentence. One is that he refused to cooperate with police. We've now seen videos of him being interrogated by the Met. He just says, no comment, no comment, no comment. And the other thing is, we just don't know what happened to the money.

19:22I mean, it seems he took about£40 ,000. That's what the CPS says. Some of it was found at his house. Some of it has disappeared. And he didn't really explain where it was. And I think one other reason was that it turned out that Nathan Gill was recruiting other MEPs, some of them from UKIP, some of them not, to take part in this covert influence campaign. And that explains why he's going away to prison for more than a decade. You abused a position of significant authority and trust, with your crimes spanning eight months, motivated by financial and political gain. The offending was sophisticated.

20:03You accepted payments from foreign nationals, made statements on important international matters at their behest, utilised scripted material presented as your own, and orchestrated the involvement of other MEPs. We should probably stress that those other MEPs were not aware that he was being paid to recruit them. They weren't necessarily part of this, right? I mean, that's right. And I can see your very careful legal hat kind of waving at the air at this point. But we also have to acknowledge that they agreed to repeat Kremlin talking points on a pro-Russian Ukrainian channel. So as a minimum, this, to my mind, was an error of judgment.

20:48He recruited a German MEP, two other MEPs as well from UKIP. So it was a pretty big group of people who were involved, wittingly or unwittingly. And what do you make of the sentence? Because there might be some people listening thinking, 10 and a half years, what? You know, just for giving a few dodgy speeches, a few dodgy interviews, and ultimately it seems that he only took maybe£40 ,000 overall. It's not millions and millions. What would you say to that? I'm not a judge or a politician, but it seems to me, I mean, he's acknowledged, he's admitted bribery, eight counts of bribery, but it seems to me that really this is about treason.

21:25It's about treachery. But essentially, Gill knowingly betrayed his electors, betrayed his country, betrayed his party for cash. We're talking about wadges of money stuffed into envelopes, which he took. And it's a pretty profound betrayal, in my view. And I think clearly that's what the judge concluded. Your misconduct has ramifications far beyond personal honour, which is now irretrievably damaged. It erodes public confidence in democracy. Coming up, what does Nathan Gill's treachery tell us about the relationship between Russia and Nigel Farage's parties?

22:18Farage was asked about this case when he was on the campaign trail in the Carephilly by election last month. And he replied, any political party can find in their midst all sorts of terrible people. And he was very much saying, you know, Nathan Gill was one bad apple, he betrayed me, and anyway, I didn't know him very well. We weren't close. Yeah, I mean, that doesn't really work as a defence, as I see it, principally because the UK Brexit Party, Reform Party and Russia are ideologically aligned. I mean, that we know from the Culture and Media Committee that the Russians launched a massive campaign to push Brexit in the months before the referendum.

22:57And why would they do that? I mean, it's kind of obvious, but spell it out. Why would they be interested in Brexit? Well, I mean, because basically they regarded Brexit as a way of weakening the UK economically, politically, militarily, dividing it from its neighbours and making us shout at each other for the best part of a decade. They were delighted with the outcome of Brexit in the same way they were delighted by the election of Donald Trump first time round. And obviously Farage was a co-struggler in that cause. And prominent people from the Leave campaign were, we know, in the Russian embassy in the run-up to Brexit.

23:29Now, you can make of that what you will, but it's a fact. Right, OK, but not Farage himself, right? Is that Aaron Banks that you're talking about? He's the guy who bankrolled Brexit, essentially, isn't he? And he's one of the self-described bad boys of Brexit. Well, that's Aaron Banks, but also, you know, one of the spies subsequently expelled from the Russian embassy, a guy called Alexander Udod, was at the Farage's victory party after Brexit. Now, I'm sure they would say that they meet all sorts of people. They meet ambassadors from different countries. That doesn't mean anything. But what we have to acknowledge is the Russians wanted Brexit and Nigel Farage also wanted Brexit.

24:02Yeah, but we should say that there's absolutely no evidence at all that Farage or indeed Aaron Banks knew what Gill was up to. And actually, it was pretty interesting, I thought, that the police have said that Gill was primarily motivated by money and not ideology. But, you know, let's not shy away from it. Farage himself has been pretty sympathetic to the Russian cause. Until 2017, he was something of a regular on Russia Today, wasn't he? Which is basically a Russian government propaganda channel. And Farage himself admitted being paid small fees, he said, of well under£5 ,000 for two appearances on that channel.