Pressure on Brexit backer Banks over ‘ links to Kremlin’

A PROMINENT Brexit campaigner is facing calls to explain his links with the Kremlin following claims his contacts with Moscow officials were more extensive than previously admitted.

Arron Banks, the founder of Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU group, held undisclosed meetings with Russian embassy officials around the time of the 2016 referendum campaign, it was reported.

Emails showed Mr Banks – a Donald Trump supporter – also discussed a potential business deal involving six Russian gold mines with ambassador Alexander Yakovenko, The Sunday Times said.

Last night the head of a parliamentary inquiry into ‘fake news’ said the report raised serious questions about Russian interference in UK politics.

Tory MP Damian Collins, chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, told BBC1’s Sunday Politics programme: ‘The question I think people will want answered is, “did Mr Banks profit out of these meetings?”

‘Did that happen? Did he make money out of it and did he use that money to fund his campaigns?’ Asked about the report at the G7 summit in Quebec on Saturday, Prime Minister Theresa May said: ‘I am sure that if there are any allegations that need investigation the proper authorities will do that.’

Mr Collins confirmed that Mr Banks has agreed to give evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee as planned on Tuesday, having previously said he was pulling out. Labour MP Stephen Kinnock also called for Scotland Yard to launch a criminal probe.

Last night Mr Banks told the Daily Mail he had already written about two meetings with the Russian ambassador in the paperback version of his book, The Bad Boys of Brexit. ‘I didn’t profit at all from this,’ he said. ‘This is just yet more generalised discrediting of the Brexit camp. I have every intention of robustly speaking to Mr Collins on Tuesday.

‘He may be investigating fake news but the biggest fake news mill is Parliament.’

The Sunday Times said emails it had seen from Mr Banks and Leave.EU communications chief Andy Wigmore showed they had repeated contacts with Russian officials to discuss matters of mutual interest throughout and after the EU referendum campaign. It said they showed Mr Banks met Mr Yakovenko three times – more than he had previously acknowledged – and made a visit to Moscow in February 2016 during the referendum campaign. The paper said he and Mr Wigmore had lunch with the ambassador in November 2016, three days after they and Mr Farage met Donald Trump in New York following his US election victory.

They were said to have been introduced to Mr Yakovenko by Alexander Udod, one of 23 suspected Russian intelligence officers ejected from the UK after the Salisbury poisoning. The ambassador was said to have proposed a deal that would have involved them in the consolidation of six Russian gold mines.

The emails were passed to The Sunday Times by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, Mr Banks’s ghostwriter on The Bad Boys Of Brexit, who is writing a book with Tory peer Lord Ashcroft on Russia’s use of ‘hybrid warfare’. But Mr Banks dismissed the claims, telling the paper: ‘I had two boozy lunches with the Russian ambassador and another cup of tea with him. Bite me. It’s a convenient political witch-hunt, both over Brexit and Trump.’

Mr Banks, whose wife is Russian, acknowledged he made a ‘family trip’ to Moscow in February 2016, but said ‘no meetings were had with anyone’. He told The Sunday Times he had also disclosed his contacts with the Russians to US officials.

Mr Wigmore told the paper: ‘We never offered any information to him (Mr Yakovenko) or any Russian any details of our (Brexit) campaign.’

‘I didn’t profit at all from this’