Thread by @karolcummins

💰Arron Banks - Panama Papers

Offshore secrets of Brexit backer Arron Banks revealed in Panama Papers

The British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar emerge as key locations in the affairs of Arron Banks, who spent £7.5m funding Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign group ahead of the Brexit referendum on 23 June.
theguardian.com/world/2016/oct…

The Panama Papers show that Banks is a shareholder of PRI Holdings Limited, which Panamanian-based Mossack Fonseca set up as an offshore company in 2013.
PRI Holdings is based in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), a UK offshore territory & int’l tax haven.
theguardian.com/world/2016/oct…

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1147203517439807488?s=21

https://twitter.com/itssuzann/status/1058001084608733184?s=21

There is also a 2010 press cutting. It recounts how in the 1990s the former Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock helped a young Russian woman, Ekaterina Paderina, stay in Britain. Paderina – known as Katya – later became Banks’s wife.
theguardian.com/world/2016/oct…

Docs reveal that the directors for Bank’s company in the BVI are provided by a firm in Gibraltar: Parliament Lane Nominees Limited.

The firm shares an address with his STM Fidecs Management Ltd, which acts as secretary to Banks’s PRI Holdings Limited.
theguardian.com/world/2016/oct…

Arron Banks - STM Fidecs Ltd

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1147919997970219008?s=21

Kentish and other STM-linked directors were key figures in a bailout of Banks’s Gibraltar-based insurance business Southern Rock that began in 2015, just months before Banks began bankrolling the Leave. EU referendum campaign.
opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

🔑The mystery cash injection was critical to the survival of Banks’s insurance empire, the foundation of his wealth.

🔑Without it, it is hard to see how he could have funded his political donations while keeping the business afloat.
opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

🔑As the Electoral Commission examines the source of Banks’s £8.4 million in donations to the Leave campaign, the role of Kentish and other STM-linked figures—were in a position to know where the bailout money came from—may reveal how Brexit was financed.
opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

📌In addition the National Crime Agency has been tasked since July 2018 to identify if the biggest political donation in British History of £8m was an illegal offshore donation and to identify it's origin.
brexituncovered.blogspot.com/2019/03/new-ev…

💰Bellingham & The British Virgin Islands

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1147202405311770624?s=21

💦💰Cotrell💰💦

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1133766988881260545?s=21

The 11.5 million docs leaked (Panama Paper reveal that British overseas territories have played a huge role in maintaining the web of secrecy that allows the world’s rich and famous to remain tax-free. 
neweurope.eu/article/panama…

🔑Britain is second only to Hong Kong as the playground of financial middlemen.

🔑Over half of the offshore companies set up by the Panamian legal consulting company Mossack Fonseca was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.
neweurope.eu/article/panama…

💰BVI💰

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1147203920638271488?s=21

A leaked email reveals Dominic Dreyfus, then a board director at
🔑FBME🔑, a bank in Cyprus with longstanding business links to Russia reached out to Banks.
thetimes.co.uk/article/more-m…

Dominic Dreyfus (#FBME), offered to arrange an intro to “an adventurous Russian (aged 65 with Belize/Israeli passports) who shares your passion for the yellow metal,”

Anyone know who the referenced Russian might be?
@mopeng @WendySiegelman
thetimes.co.uk/article/more-m…

Dreyfus said the Guinea goldmine deal “didn’t go through”. He also said he was “very disappointed” at the closure of FBME and “unaware” of any misconduct.

#SureJan
thetimes.co.uk/article/more-m…

💰FBME Bank💰

👉🏼Cyprus👉🏼Russia
👉🏼Aaron Banks 👉🏼Trump👉🏼Manafort

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1147602679859777536?s=21

📌The email is buried in a cache of dozens of Banks’s leaked communications that have been handed to the National Crime Agency (NCA), the elite UK crime-fighting organisation.
thetimes.co.uk/article/more-m…

🔑The leaked emails handed to the NCA also reveal yet more meetings between Banks and Alexander Yakovenko, Vladimir Putin’s envoy in London. Banks was forced to admit that he had enjoyed another two meetings with Yakovenko,
thetimes.co.uk/article/more-m…

🔑Including a lunch three days after he and Farage had visited Trump in New York in November 2016.

🔑During the meal with the ambassador, Banks handed over phone numbers for members of Trump’s transition team.
thetimes.co.uk/article/more-m…

🔑Banks admitting to a fourth meeting with YAKOVENKO. In August 2016, less than a week before the Brexit donor met Trump at a fundraiser in Mississippi, Banks had lunch with the ambassador.
thetimes.co.uk/article/more-m…

Banks shared w/ YAKOVENKO: his team’s deep ties to Trump’s insurgent presidential bid in the US. Major Brexit supporter, Bannon just installed as CE of Trump’s campaign. And Banks & Brexiteers had been invited to attend a fundraiser w/ Trump in Mississippi
washingtonpost.com/politics/how-t…

🔑Dont forget In 2012, the Russian spy SERGEY NALOBIN was the key figure at the heart of an organization called Conservative Friends of Russia.

📌The launch of which, was held in RU Amb Alexander YAKOVENKO’s garden.

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1142553073140715521?s=21

‼️Sergey Nalobin & Boris Johnson

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1142525647115317248?s=21

As noted above, Banks’s wife, Katya, is Russian. A prominent “ambassador” for Leave. EU, Jim Mellon, whom Banks has described as a “friend and business partner,” made much of his money by investing in Russia.
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

A report revealed that firms in which Mellon has major interests continued to invest in Russia over the years, adopting a strategy of investing in companies with “management close to Putin,” and that Mellon met w/ YAKOVENKO several times over the years.
opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

Mellon served as co-founder, non-executive director, and major shareholder of Charlemagne Capital.
atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atla…

The New York Times reported that three weeks after the referendum Charlemagne Capital participated in the deeply discounted private placement of Alrosa shares that Banks says he turned down.
nytimes.com/2018/06/29/wor…

Banks’s 2016 memoir, “The Bad Boys of Brexit,” acknowledges that before the referendum campaign he met with Russian officials, including Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian Ambassador to London.
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

📌Subsequent reporting has uncovered several other previously undisclosed meetings and contacts between Banks and Russian businessmen, during which opportunities with Russian firms in the ‘mineral sector’ were discussed.
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

‼️Timeline:

Are these ‘biz opportunities’: “gold & diamond” mines nothing more than a cover & shiny penny for suspected illicit funding via FBME, etc routed through various off shore shell companies or something more?🤔

🔑In light of these connections, and others, the National Crime Agency’s investigation, is ongoing.

newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former communications chief, said “There are still so many questions unanswered about Banks—where the money came from, and his role in the Brexit campaign of lies and misdemeanors.”
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

🔑The government of the U.K. has been strikingly muted in its response to the evidence of contacts between Banks and Russian diplomats. #GLOMAR

newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

🔑According to various reports, in the early months of 2016, while Theresa May was Home Secretary, she refused a request by British intelligence services to investigate Banks’s conduct. 🤔
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

🔑In November, 2018, when the National Crime Agency investigation was announced, David Lammy, a Labour M.P., demanded that Britain’s departure from the E.U. be “put on hold until we know the extent of these crimes against our democracy.”
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

3/19: Channel Four News reveals Arron Banks sought Russian investments into his businesses, in particular his Company actively attempted to secure a preferential deal worth billions which originally came via Alexander YAKOVENKO, the RU Amb to the UK.
brexituncovered.blogspot.com/2019/03/new-ev…

🔑5/4/19: Alexander YAKOVENKO, the Russian ambassador to London is to leave his post after eight years – just weeks after The Mail on Sunday revealed he may have worked in the US as a Soviet spy.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6…

🔑The revelation is centered on Mr Yakovenko's disappearance from the US in 1986 at the time the US was sending dozens of Soviet diplomats working in New York back home
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6…

💰Bank of Cyprus & TeamTrump

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1147228331944714240?s=21

‼️Brexit Thread

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1134876790999068672?s=21

‼️Boris Johnson Thread

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1133724377055293441?s=21

‼️Nigel Farage & TeamTrump

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1136050494214770688?s=21

@threadreaderapp unroll TY.
#Banks
#Yakovenko
#Farage
#Bannon
#Mercer
#CambridgeAnalytica
#Trump
#Brexit
#2016Election
#VoteLeave
#FBME
#DominicDreyfus
#IsleOfMan
#Mellon
#BVI
#Gibralter
#Bellingham
#STM
#Putin
#KatyaBanks
#PRIHoldings
#Kentish
#SERGEYNALOBIN
#CharlemagneCapital

@PaulHanley12 ^^ now to circle back on Bellingham.