FARAGE’S LIVE-IN LADY AND THE £400K UKIP BUNG
He shares secret £4m bachelor pad with glamorous French politician... who’s at centre of dodgy donation row
FORMER Ukip leader Nigel Farage is sharing a secret £4million bachelor pad with an attractive French politician at the centre of a probe into illegal funding of his party.
Laure Ferrari, who is 15 years younger than the married Brexit campaigner, moved in with Mr Farage in a grand Georgian house in an upmarket area of West London last week.
She was photographed outside the property early on Friday morning, dressed in tracksuit bottoms and putting out the bins, shortly before Mr Farage left in his chauffeur-driven Land
Rover. Mr Farage last night confirmed that Miss Ferrari had been living at his Chelsea house but said it was ‘crackers’ to suggest they were having an affair. He told The Mail on Sunday he ‘knew her well’ but was just helping her out with somewhere to stay.
Miss Ferrari and Mr Farage first met a decade ago when she was a waitress and he got her a job in the European Parliament. Now she is the head of a think-tank accused of breaking rules by diverting public money to Ukip when Mr Farage was its leader.
Ukip is under investigation by the Electoral Commission watchdog for allegedly taking a total of £400,000 in dodgy donations from the thinktank and an affiliated political alliance, ahead of the General Election and the EU referendum.
Mr Farage said he was giving Miss Ferrari ‘short-term help’ with her accommodation because she had nowhere else to go and needed money.
Asked if he had slept with her, he said: ‘I’m not answering ludicrous questions, like have you ever held her hand, ever had dinner with her.
‘She is someone I have worked with and known well for a long time who wanted somewhere to stay for a week that wouldn’t cost her any money. It’s a working relationship. You can inflate it however you want to.’
Last month Miss Ferrari was also by Mr Farage’s side at a glitzy Washington DC party to celebrate the election of his new friend, US President Donald Trump.
She runs the Eurosceptic think-tank the Institute for Direct Democracy in Europe (IDDE).
That, and a related political grouping known as the Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe (ADDE), have received more than £1million a year from the EU. But they have already been ordered to pay back hundreds of thousands of pounds by the European Parliament, while Ukip faces a fine of up to £20,000 if it is found to have broken British election law.
Mr Farage told this newspaper that he ‘absolutely denied’ claims of wrongdoing concerning any financial link, adding: ‘We are fighting it very hard.’
Miss Ferrari said she had been forced to move out of her own flat after the European Parliament stopped the IDDE’s funding and said: ‘I have no trustworthy friends in London who could have hosted me. I asked and he accepted. He is just trying to be helpful.’
She, too, denied any affair, saying: ‘You are putting two and two together, but it is not as simple as that. I cannot stop people from fantasising. I am not pleased to be in this situation and I am so sorry it is bringing awful things on Nigel’s life and on my life.’
This newspaper told last month how Mr Farage was staying in a ‘bachelor pad’ in London on weeknights, but he refused to say where it was and denied that he had split from his German-born second wife, Kirsten, with whom he has two daughters.
When asked about the state of his marriage at the time, he replied: ‘We get by and bumble along, like most people.’
Today we can reveal that his bolthole is a three-bedroom Georgian house, worth an estimated £4million and owned by a businessman, in a quiet Chelsea side street.
And 52-year-old Mr Farage has been sharing it with 37-year-old Miss Ferrari for a week.
They were certainly both there overnight on Friday. Mr Farage arrived at 10.40am on Thursday, dropped off by a Land Rover Discovery. He later went out and returned at 8.25pm, after his LBC radio show, entering by the back door.
At 8.03am the following morning, Miss Ferrari emerged from the front door dressed in a grey sweatshirt, casual blue jogging bottoms and a beige wool hat. She placed a black bin liner full of rubbish and another clear bag of recycling outside the front wall.
Mr Farage emerged from the back door 25 minutes later, in his usual outfit of tweed jacket and mustard corduroy trousers. He was picked up by a Land Rover Discovery.
He returned back to the Chelsea house at 10pm, having spent the day campaigning for Ukip ahead of a key by-election in Stoke-on-Trent.
Miss Ferrari has previously spoken of how she began working for Mr Farage and fellow Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom after meeting them in the Strasbourg restaurant where she waited tables in 2007.
She once told an interviewer: ‘I met these two MEPs and we started talking about politics.
‘The two Brits have no hierarchy and neither of them comes from a political background.’ In June 2013, Miss Ferrari posted on Twitter a link to a newspaper feature asking ‘Why do more women want to bed Nigel Farage over David Cameron?’
She was originally Mr Bloom’s parliamentary assistant then head of public relations to a European Parliament grouping led by Mr Farage, and was a candidate for a small Right-wing party known as Debout la République (Arise The Republic) at European elections in 2014. The party, since renamed Debout la France, is one of ten nationalist parties that make up the ADDE group, which was set up in 2014 by Ukip and funded by the European Parliament.
In March 2015, she was elected as executive director for the ADDE’s think tank, the IDDE. The two organisations share an office in Brussels but Miss Ferrari moved to London, setting up a consultancy firm from an address in Clapham.
Miss Ferrari spoke alongside Ukip politicians and other Brexit campaigners at public events in Dorset and Norfolk ahead of last June’s referendum.
Late last year Miss Ferrari became caught up in the scandal involving Ukip funding ahead of the Brexit poll and the 2015 General Election, in which Mr Farage unsuccessfully tried to become an MP. The European Parliament announced that, following an audit, it discovered that the ADDE and IDDE had mis-spent €534,478 (£461,658) of taxpayers’ cash on political parties and election campaigns, much of it benefiting Ukip.
European Union money is only meant to be spent on activities at a European level, not on domestic campaigning.
The ADDE carried out nine opinion polls in the UK, published a report and carried out consultancy services connected to the polling, which ‘breached the rules for European party financing’.
It was told to pay back €172,655 and had another €248,345 grant withheld. It has been claimed that ADDE cash was given to Ukip staff to canvass voters in seats where the party hoped to do well. And the
Miss Ferrari has tweeted about Farage’s sexiness
IDDE paid for a poll ‘related to the EU referendum in the UK’.
It was said to have wrongly spent €33,863 in total, including paying for a Dutch referendum advert arranged by Mr Farage. The Electoral Commission then announced in November that it would investigate Ukip to see if ‘the party accepted impermissible donations’ from the two groups, following the European Parliament ruling.
It said that after ‘these expenses were declared as non-eligible for the financing’ by Brussels, ‘the Commission has opened its own investigation into Ukip to look at whether there has been any breach of UK election law. This includes whether any impermissible donations have been accepted.’
Political parties are meant to record all donations and check they come from permissible sources.
If they are found to have committed offences, parties can be ordered to pay back donations and hit by fines of up to £20,000.
The Electoral Commission said last night that its investigation was ongoing.