07/07/2026
The fact is that Farage and Reform have always been embedded in this web of dodgy characters and questionable funding. As citizen journalism brings more and more of it to the surface they're sliding in the polls because nobody wants to vote for that sort of person.
The revelations about Nigel Farage being extensively funded by a convicted criminal are bad enough. But there are some aspects of this story that have not yet been fully highlighted.
1) "Posh George" Cottrell's fraud conviction in the US came after he was discovered to have been offering his services as a money launderer to drug dealers. IRS agents testified that Cottrell had “proposed a variety of methods he could use to disguise their drug profits, evade federal income taxes, and promote the continuation of their drug business”. He also claimed to have contacts at banks to funnel drug money to offshore accounts and disguise them as legitimate earnings.
2) After Cottrell was arrested in the US (where he was accompanying Farage to support Donald Trump's election campaign), another of Farage's close associates, Andy Wigmore, forwarded documents about the arrest to Sergey Fedichkin, a "third secretary" at Russia's London Embassy.
3) Fedichkin was the guy who invited Brexit campaign bankroller Arron Banks to the first of many meetings with the Russian Ambassador in 2016. This was after Banks and Wigmore had earlier met with Alexander Udod, a Russian spy who was later expelled form the UK following the nerve agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
4) No satisfactory explanation has ever been offered as to why Putin's regime might have been interested in the arrest of a crook who was deeply involved with funding Farage and his political parties, or why a close associate of Nigel Farage forwarded information about Cottrell's arrest on money-laundering charges to a Russian official.
This has all been public knowledge for nearly a decade. It is absolutely extraordinary that most of the UK media has, until now, shown so little interest in this network of shady relationships around a man who has been touted as a future prime minister.