Quite why this point should have been withheld from the public isn’t clear. Part of the reason may be that he pleaded guilty, so the prosecution didn’t need to go into the evidence in detail, and the trial was short, perhaps to avoid embarrassing Reform UK Ltd any more than necessary. But I speculate.
Gill himself is an interesting character. He is a long-time associate of Nigel Farage, first standing for UKIP in 2012 along with his American wife and his sister (it was apparently a family undertaking), and he became the MEP for Wales in the 2014 European elections. Gill had previously owned care homes in Hull where he was born, until his company, with 180 employees, went bust after the financial crash in 2008.
Many of his care home staff were recruited from Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, so adding to the very 'problem' that UKIP was formed to solve! What a puzzle. He is also a Mormon and a man-made climate change denier.
Gill was stopped at Manchester Airport in September 2021 under the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act, and his mobile phone was found to contain WhatsApp messages revealing exchanges with Voloshyn. Again, it’s not obvious how security forces knew where to look, but I assume they either had a tip-off or were monitoring Gill for other reasons. WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, so I assume they didn’t hack his phone before he was detained.
He is said to have involved "other members of the European Parliament" to make media statements in support of Viktor Medvedchuk, a former Ukrainian politician who is close to Vladimir Putin, and now lives in Russia. He denied a charge of 'conspiracy' to commit bribery, so I assume he kept all the money himself.
Gill admitted being paid to make two speeches to the European Parliament, which prosecutors said followed “scripts” provided by Voloshyn, which then appeared in the Russian state-controlled media, being quoted by Medvedchuk.
There have been attempts to link Farage to the affair but at the moment the story looks like it’s had its day. However, it provides further evidence that Russia is quite happy to pay politicians in the West. We know that Russia paid Tenet Media in Tennessee $10 million last year to "create and distribute content to US audiences with hidden Russian government messaging". Tenet and the right-wing influencers they paid later claimed to have been the "victims of a Russian plot."
What we don’t know is who else has taken Russian money to peddle pro-Kremlin talking points, which are then reported in Russian media, or who else has been coerced by Kompromat, something the KGB (now the FSB) in Russia has always been good at. I am certain we would be shocked by the sheer amount of cash emanating from Russian sources and ending up in the pockets of politicians, commentators and influencers in the West.
Once money has been accepted, the recipients are, of course, at risk of being blackmailed to do more. The bribe is the Kompromat in some cases, I assume. Look what's happened to Gill.
In other cases, the Kompromat is actually used and even broadcast on Russian state TV to discredit someone the Kremlin wants to silence. It has happened to a former prime minister and a prosecutor general who was investigating claims of corruption in the Kremlin in the 1990s. Putin himself, as the then head of the KGB confirmed the footage was authentic. The BBC has the stories HERE.
Even the British deputy consul-general in Yekaterinburg was forced to step down in 2009 after footage allegedly showing his own sexual encounter with two prostitutes was made public. Kompromat is actually quite a moderate policy by the FSB. There have been an awful lot of inexplicable suicides by opponents of Putin or businessmen with close links to him. The most recent example being Alexander Tyunin, a CEO of a carbon fibre company, who was found dead on 20 September 20 near his car with a rifle and a suicide note citing depression. I’ve lost count of the number of businessmen who fell out of high windows in Russia.
Of course, Gill and the right-wing influencers in America are pretty low-level, but rumours and allegations go all the way up to Donald Trump. Who knows which people have taken money?
I think much of what has happened both in Britain (Brexit) and in the USA with Donald Trump and his frequently odd choice of cabinet members, and things that often defy rational explanation, may well have come about because of Russian influence using money or Kompromat or both. We will probably never know.
However, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, the files of the STASI in East Germany became public, and you never know, it could happen one day in Moscow. What a treasure trove that would be.
