Who's really bankrolling Nigel Farage?

Nigel Farage has some…strange revenue streams. The leader of Reform UK has been paid about £700,000 to front ads for a gold bullion company. His fixer, Posh George, once advertised money laundering on the dark web and served time in a US prison. His biggest Brexit donor Arron Banks claimed his fortune came from South African diamond mines that, when reporters checked, weren't actually operating. Now Farage's newest backers are crypto players, and he's using his platform to talk up both gold and cryptocurrency, the two assets favoured by people convinced the financial system is about to collapse. So who benefits when a powerful politician is bankrolled by people who profit from instability? Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:37Matt Bevan?

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• 0:42Matt Bevan?

  If you've ever been in the market for gold, you might have come across this ad featuring Nigel Farage.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Behind me is the Bank of England. That's where our national gold reserves are held. But hey, you can old gold too.

• 0:54Matt Bevan?

  Until pretty recently, the leader of the Reform UK party was making these pretty generic ads for a gold bullion company promoting the benefits of investing in gold.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  The government takes more of your money. Gold is how you protect yourself.

• 1:10Matt Bevan?

  Now, vague statements like that one are hard to interrogate, but the numbers behind the statements aren't, which is why I'm particularly interested in one ad that Farage did where he included a few charts.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Are you worried about the value of your money and its purchasing power? Well, you should be, because over the last 20 years, every pound now buys half of what it did.

• 1:33Matt Bevan?

  Okay, pause it right there. So the chart featured in this part of the ad shows the decreasing value of one pound from 2004 to 2024. It's pretty accurate. It's pretty much halved.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Inflation is constantly eating away at your money.

• 1:50Matt Bevan?

  But the reason this ad is so interesting to me is because he then goes on to show a second chart.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Now, I spent 20 years in the metals business before getting involved in politics. And one commodity I've always liked is gold. And over the last 20 years, whilst your money in the bank has been depreciating, the price of gold has been incredible. It's produced amazing returns over 20 years.

• 2:16Matt Bevan?

  Okay, pause it there. So while our previous chart shows the value of the pound decreasing over the last two decades, this one has a line representing the value of gold over the same time period, and it's increasing. According to Farage, if you bought an ounce of gold in 2004 for £232 and kept it for 20 years, it would be worth £1,700. Now, on the surface, these charts make gold look like a great investment. But when you put these charts together, what they show is actually extremely misleading.

• 2:55Matt Bevan?

  He's saying that inflation means your money is worth less. But also, look, gold is worth much more money than it was before. Do you think that inflation might have something to do with that, Nigel? In real terms, gold was essentially flat for more than half of the two decades Farage is talking about. It was smoked by stock market rises. Farage must know this. After all, he-

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Spent 20 years in the metals business.

• 3:28Matt Bevan?

  Now, I'm not here to say that Farage is wrong and that gold is a terrible investment. Between 2004 and 2011, gold was genuinely a good investment, as the global financial crisis drove people out of stocks and into more stable investments like gold. But then its value went flat for a decade. Stocks, however, tend to recover quickly. Here's the thing about gold. When you look at the market, you'll see it really only performs well during a crisis. World wars, the global financial crisis. Otherwise, stocks, bonds or property are generally a better investment, which means if you want people to buy gold,

• 4:10Matt Bevan?

  you really have to convince them that a catastrophe is imminent. And so-

• 4:15Speaker 02

  The country is now in deeper debt than it has ever, ever been. The global situation is the most perilous it's been in my lifetime. We've got a war going on in Ukraine, a war going on in the Middle East, and who knows what China's intentions on Taiwan might be. So these are deeply worrying, very, very unstable times.

• 4:39Matt Bevan?

  Now, admittedly, this scheme has paid dividends for at least one person, Nigel Farage. Since the start of 2024, he's been paid about £700,000 to do these ads for Direct Bullion London. And his hustles aren't limited to selling gold. He's also been given millions of pounds by cryptocurrency guys. And these questionable donations are one of the reasons he was forced to resign his seat in parliament and hold a by-election. He wants a mandate from the public to ignore questions about all that money he's been getting.

• 5:23Matt Bevan?

  There's a pattern here, though, and it runs through some of the strangest people in British politics. A fixer who advertised money laundering on the dark web, a donor whose diamond mines didn't exist. To understand why they're all circling Nigel Farage, you have to follow the money backwards. So let's do that together. I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

• 5:55Matt Bevan?

  This whole story plays out a little bit like a Guy Ritchie movie. It's high on raps gallions and high jinks. So let's start with the crew assembly phase of the movie.

• 6:08Matt Bevan?

  First, we're going to meet Farage's fixer, George Cottrell, who apparently goes by Posh George. Here's how Nigel Farage described Posh George in an interview with the Trigonometry Podcast.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  He is, of course, an enormously colourful character. I mean, great press, all the that the girlfriends he's had and the things he's done and all of it.

• 6:31Matt Bevan?

  Posh George is from an aristocratic family. His uncle is a lord who owned a Formula One team.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Hesketh's uncle of Formula One and mum dated the man that's now the king.

• 6:44Matt Bevan?

  Oh, yes. And his mother Fiona is an ex-girlfriend of King Charles.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  So of course there are great reasons why he's a person of interest.

• 6:52Matt Bevan?

  He was introduced to Farage by his uncle, Lord Hesketh, sometime around 2013 or 14, when he was just 20 years old and Farage's star was on the rise.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  Nigel Farage is calling it a political earthquake. His United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, won 27% of the vote, more than Labour or the Conservatives.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  The People's Army of UKIP have spoken tonight and delivered just about the most extraordinary results that has been seen in British politics for 100 years.

• 7:25Matt Bevan?

  Initially, Posh George was a volunteer fundraiser, but he was also doing a bit of fundraising for himself on the side. He'd started advertising a service he could provide on the dark web. The service was money laundering. In March 2014, he was contacted by a potential client. He flew to the US the following month to meet up. Initially, George was hesitant to travel to the US for the purposes of doing crime, but his contacts had suggested meeting up in Las Vegas, and as a gambling addict, he couldn't resist.

• 8:05Matt Bevan?

  In Vegas, he met up with two businessmen, and they went to dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant. At the restaurant, the men told him that they make $2.5 million a year trafficking cocaine from Phoenix to New York. Then, Posh George returned to London. What happened next is a bit murky. There's some conflicting accounts, which I'll get to in just a second. But back in the UK, he started rapidly getting closer and closer to Farage.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Time and again during the referendum contest, he was Nigel Farage's right-hand man, passing him the mic, telling him what next.

• 8:43Matt Bevan?

  He was with Farage all the way through the Brexit referendum.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  This will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people.

• 8:56Matt Bevan?

  After the referendum, Farage announced he was intending to travel to the United States to campaign for Donald Trump.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  You're going to be going to the Republican National Convention next week. This is going to be one heck of an election here.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  I think there's one big message that I'm going to bring to Cleveland next week.

• 9:11Matt Bevan?

  Posh George, as Farage's right-hand man, went too. But on the way through Chicago Airport, George was taken aside for a bit of a chat with the authorities. They let him continue through to Cleveland for the convention. George told his colleagues that he was carrying a large amount of cigarettes on him, and that's why he was questioned. But a few days later, he was arrested.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  He's been charged with conspiracy to launder drugs money and faces years in prison if found guilty.

• 9:40Matt Bevan?

  Those drug dealers he met in Las Vegas, it turns out that they were federal agents conducting a sting operation on him.

• 9:47Speaker 05

  He's now accused on 21 counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering, money laundering itself, wire fraud and even blackmail against the undercover FBI men who mounted the sting.

• 10:01Matt Bevan?

  According to the indictment, George had continued corresponding with the agents after returning to London and eventually threatened to report them to authorities if they didn't pay him a ransom of 130 Bitcoin. At the time, that amount of Bitcoin was worth about $80,000. It would be worth about $11.5 million now. But Posh George didn't get his Bitcoin. See, federal agents are tricky to blackmail with threats of reporting them to themselves. George ended up pleading guilty to wire fraud and spent eight months in a maximum security prison. He later told The Telegraph that his time in British boarding

• 10:43Matt Bevan?

  schools prepared him well for a stint in an American maximum security jail. But in that same interview with The Telegraph, he basically put the whole thing down to just a misunderstanding. And that's, that's what Farage says about it too.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  George, as a young man, got into trouble in America. If you are involved in tax avoidance schemes, it is very easy in America to get into very, very big trouble.

• 11:09Matt Bevan?

  To be clear, in his plea bargain submitted under oath, Posh George says that he advertised money laundering services on the dark web and was planning to divert criminal proceeds into his own accounts and keep them, basically to rob the drug dealers, which, I mean, doesn't sound like tax avoidance to me. But what do I know?

• 11:34Matt Bevan?

  All right, so Posh George is our fixer. Now we're going to meet the money man, a guy aptly named Aaron Banks.

• 11:47Speaker 05

  I'm a self-made person. I made my money from a desk and two telephones. So I resent your kind of comment that I'm some sort of rich Tory.

• 11:54Matt Bevan?

  Aaron Banks had previously been a big donor to the Conservative Party. But in 2014, he made a big splash when he suddenly made a million pound donation to Farage's UKIP.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Someone has to fund us. We have to have money.

• 12:08Matt Bevan?

  At the time, most people had no idea who this guy was and were sceptical about how he was able to make such a, by British standards, massive political donation. Now, it's clear that our money man had money. What wasn't clear was where exactly that money was coming from.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  It seems like I'm suggesting-

• 12:27Speaker 05

  About 30 businesses involving diamond mining, involved insurance, banking.

• 12:31Matt Bevan?

  See, when journalists at the time went poking around to try and figure out how he was able to give so much money to Nigel Farage, they found mysterious things. For example, Banks told Channel 4 that a chunk of his money was coming from South African diamond mines.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  Diamond mines? Diamond mines, yes, in Kimberley. It's the old De Beers Kimberley mine. And you, you own it? Yeah, we own seven mines there. Not all of them, but there's quite a cluster. What's that worth? Quite a lot. We pulled out a 12-carat diamond last week.

• 13:03Matt Bevan?

  But when they sent a reporter to South Africa to check out the mines for themselves, they weren't operating. He has said that the diamond industry is the most fun he's ever had in business. It is admittedly after office hours, but if there is fun to be had here, it isn't obvious how.

• 13:23Matt Bevan?

  The BBC, meanwhile, had a look at his Gibraltar-based auto insurance business and found that it pays out almost three times as much in claim settlements as it takes in as a premium.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  For Southern Rock, they pay out £2.86 for every one pound of income that they generate.

• 13:40Matt Bevan?

  So for every pound they get in, they're paying £2.86 out. The Guardian found that his other insurance businesses were also barely breaking even. Between 2014 and 2016, Banks gave Farage £450,000 in personal gifts and became the biggest political donor in British history, dumping a total of £8 million into UKIP and the campaign to leave the EU in the Brexit referendum. Subsequent reporting by Bloomberg News calculated that Banks's donations were equivalent to about a quarter of his known assets. So he gave away a quarter of his money in political donations, apparently.

• 14:26Matt Bevan?

  Given the confusing nature of his business interests and the fact that he'd taken several meetings during the Brexit campaign with various Russians, rumours started flying.

• 14:37Speaker 05

  For months, there has been speculation Mr. Banks was being funded from sources in Russia.

• 14:43Matt Bevan?

  A criminal investigation began.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  The UK's top organised crime agency is investigating the true origins of Aaron Banks' huge political donations.

• 14:53Matt Bevan?

  But he was cleared of any wrongdoing. Bloomberg found that it was more likely that the donations had been funded by lending money from his own insurance companies, which apparently is totally illegal. Banks then launched a big defamation case, which essentially stopped any more journos from poking around, including us. No more poking, we promise.

• 15:18Matt Bevan?

  So that's Nigel Farage's Brexit era in a circle. A money man whose fortune nobody could quite explain and a fixer who ended up in the custody of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons.

• 15:33Matt Bevan?

  Despite all the investigations and jail time, both Aaron Banks and Posh George are still in the picture, still in Farage's inner circle. Banks is now a key figure in Farage's current party, Reform UK, and stood as a candidate for the party in a mayoral election last year. Meanwhile, Posh George reportedly has spent significant sums of money paying for Farage's private security detail and considers him a father figure. Speaking to the Trigonometry Podcast, Farage has sought to downplay the importance of his friend's criminal past.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  So he has a conviction. Maybe that conviction will be pardoned one day. I don't know. That conviction is spent.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  There used to be a thing in Britain called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, 1974. It meant that people actually, once they'd done their time, were forgiven and given a second chance.

• 16:28Matt Bevan?

  And what has Posh George been doing with his second chance? Well, he's been living in Montenegro, writing a book called How to Launder Money and getting into cryptocurrency. Back in 2020, he and Farage had lunch with crypto billionaire Christopher Harborn, who is the part owner of the cryptocurrency Tether. Days later, Posh George was part of the team launching a new gambling platform using Harborn's cryptocurrency.

• 16:58Speaker 05

  Introducing Tether Bet, the world's most exclusive sportsbook, providing the highest limits, anytime, anywhere, on every sport.

• 17:12Matt Bevan?

  Harborn subsequently became Farage's new biggest financial backer, donating £25 million to Reform UK over the last seven years and providing Farage with a £5 million personal gift in 2024, which is perhaps why Farage is now not only spruiking the benefits of investing in gold, but cryptocurrency too.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  I was advocating in 2020 that people should have crypto, have a bit of Bitcoin as part of their portfolio. Bring crypto and digital assets in from the cold.

• 17:50Matt Bevan?

  Farage has even been specifically talking up the company belonging to his biggest donor.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Tether is about to be valued as a $500 billion company. You know, stable coins, crypto, this world is enormous. And I've been urging for years that London should embrace it.

• 18:08Matt Bevan?

  There's something odd going on here. Cryptocurrency, online gambling, that thing with the Direct Bullion London Gold Company. All of these things have been circling Farage for years now. In fact, the entire anti-establishment, right-wing political ecosphere is getting into both gold and crypto in a big way. Well, I'm a big crypto, I've become a big crypto guy.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  We are about to place our Bitcoin order.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Go talk to Philip Patrick in the team today, brichgold.com, promo code Bannon.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Go to trishlovesgold.com today.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Tether Gold is real gold on the blockchain, actual gold bars you on. You won't be able to buy gold at more competitive prices anywhere.

• 18:53Matt Bevan?

  Thing is, gold and crypto are kind of polar opposites to each other. Gold is considered a very stable, boring, safe thing to invest in, whereas crypto is obviously incredibly volatile.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  They sold that meme coin, which netted a huge amount of money for them, but left about a million investors, I think about $3 billion in the hole.

• 19:15Matt Bevan?

  But the overlap is that both of them are attractive to people who think the traditional established financial and political system is on the verge of collapsing. They don't trust the government, they don't trust the banks, and they don't trust the global elite.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  I've got to tell you, from personal experience, I don't particularly trust the banks.

• 19:35Speaker 05

  I think a lot of the people that are elites aren't elite. I think the people that are elite are elite, so we're going to have to maybe switch that around somehow.

• 19:41Matt Bevan?

  Thing is, if you draw a Venn diagram with one circle being guys who don't trust the banks or the government, another being guys who might want to put their savings into gold or crypto and guys who would like to vote for Nigel Farage or Donald Trump, you basically have a single large circle. Trump and Farage are two of the most influential people in the Western world. And they're using that influence to promote the idea that the Western world is falling apart and you need to put your money in non-traditional assets like crypto and gold.

• 20:20Matt Bevan?

  A lot of journalists, citizens and regulators are spending a lot of time trying to find reasons why any of this is breaching any kind of rules. For now, it seems that it's all above board. But I'm not all that interested in the rules of the situation. What I'm interested in is simpler. We are used to politicians being funded by establishment companies, finance, mining, manufacturing, defence. But clearly that has all changed. We now have some of the most powerful politicians on earth whose careers are funded by very strange people who profit from instability, who profit from fear.

• 21:03Matt Bevan?

  And that is, I mean, it's definitely different.

• 21:15Matt Bevan?

  If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It's produced by Adair Shepherd. Next week's episode, we're going to be digging into something strange that I've started noticing online. A lot of MAGA big dogs who were formerly very much in Team Russia have all started posting pro-Ukraine content on their social media feeds. So what's going on here? Why the change of heart after four years of war? That's coming up next on If You're Listening.