Tycoon’s Russian wife whose life is like a spy novel
ARRON BANKS is known to make frequent trips to Russia, which he says are family visits for his Russian wife Katya Paderina to see her mother Olga in the city of Ekaterinburg, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow.
When The Mail on Sunday spoke to Olga Paderina last year she insisted that neither her daughter nor Banks had any business in Russia.
There is no doubt 45-year-old Katya’s own story reads like something out of a spy novel.
Ekaterina Paderina, to give her full name, arrived in Britain in the 1990s to study marketing at Portsmouth University and swiftly began a romance with retired merchant seaman Eric Butler. Despite the age gap – she was 25 and he was 54 – the couple married in November 1998. The union lasted only months and Mr Butler filed for divorce in 1999.
It was in October 2001 that Katya married Banks and moved to live with the businessman, 51, in his home near Bristol.
No one can doubt Banks’s business acumen. The value of his insurance empire has soared and he has also acquired five diamond mines in South Africa and Lesotho.
In the five months leading up to the EU referendum, he gave a £6million loan to Leave.EU, the campaign he helped found with Nigel Farage, and a further £2.1million to Grassroots Out, a separate group, through his Better For The Country Ltd campaigning firm. The £8.1 million was described as the ‘single biggest donation to a political cause in British history’.
Banks, who denies any links between Moscow and Brexit, has professed admiration for Vladimir Putin, another supporter of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.
It is not known whether Banks’s respect for Russia pre-dates his relationship with Katya, who has given birth to three children since their marriage.
Her father, Evgeny, is described as former ‘head of government property’ in Ekaterinburg. Her email address contains the numbers 007 and she drives a Range Rover with the number plate MI5 SPY, although Banks denies any other associations with the Russian government.