Thread by @karolcummins

💰Arron Banks - STM Fidecs Ltd

STM Fidecs Ltd was the first to register Leave.EU as a wholly owned subsidiary. Its ownership then passed to Banks.
theguardian.com/politics/2015/…

🔑Banks was previously a “substantial” shareholder in the firm’s parent company.

📌And the Panama Papers give further details of Banks’s offshore interests. He is listed as a shareholder of PRI Holdings, together with two other people.
theguardian.com/world/2016/oct…

One of them is Elizabeth Bilney, the chief executive of Leave.EU. Documents show Banks owns 25,500 shares in the firm, and Bilney 12,250.
theguardian.com/world/2016/oct…

An email sent to Mossack Fonseca includes a flowchart that sets out how Banks’s complex corporate interests fit together.

Banks is at the top.

An arrow points down to PRI Holdings, which is described as a “holding company for international contracts”.
theguardian.com/world/2016/oct…

🔑In 2014, Banks made a spectacular £1 million pledge to Ukip heralding his arrival in British politics, however Banks was already firmly on the radar of authorities in Gibraltar.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌Finances at his SOUTHERN ROCK Insurance Company had been shaky for years and now regulators feared a meltdown.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌When in 2014 PwC’s findings confirmed their fears about Southern Rock’s fragility, Banks was pushed to resign as chief executive officer, along with another director and longstanding associate—Alan Kentish.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌ICS Risk Solutions, a holding company on the Isle of Man, agreed to pump £77.7 million into Southern Rock to save it from collapse. In return, ICS would take a slice of the Gibraltar company’s future income.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

ICS Risk Solutions

https://twitter.com/wendysiegelman/status/1014274361946267648?s=21

Because Banks owned both ICS and Southern Rock, it is not clear where the new money came from.

But the arrival of the funds coincided with changes to the management of ICS.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

April 2015, the day before the initial rescue deal, Louise Kentish, the wife of STM’s boss, joined the ICS board.

🔑On 6/24/16, the day after the referendum, Alan Kentish followed, along with two other new directors—the former & current chairmen of STM.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

#Scot24

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1134536763093934080?s=21

Banks’s ties to Kentish and STM go back to at least 2004, when Kentish became a founding director of Southern Rock. Banks in turn invested in STM and was its largest shareholder before selling his stake in early 2015.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌More recently, Kentish, Banks and another STM founder co-invested in Legal Protection Group, a broker of insurance for lawyers and doctors that operates from Banks’s Bristol headquarters.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

The arrival of Banks’s long held STM contacts at ICS at the time it found the money to save Southern Rock suggests they may hold the secret to the real source of the bailout funds that ensured Bank’s financial survival as he pumped millions into Leave. EU.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

Public records suggest there may be an undeclared shareholder in ICS. Banks has said he owns 90% of the company, with management and staff holding the rest.

📌But the filings state he owns less—between 50% and 75%—with no info on the remainder
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

Gibraltar’s Financial Services Commission is closely monitoring the arrangement between ICS and Southern Rock.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

💰Offshore controversies

Kentish and STM specialise in keeping secrets. A core line of STM’s business is setting up offshore trusts, opaque financial structures that make it difficult to trace who ultimately owns the assets in them. (See #BVI)
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌In 2002 STM was sued by the UK tax authorities after it set up a trust for an alleged fraudster suspected of masterminding a £100 million VAT scam.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

Kentish’s 2017 arrest in Gibraltar, after which he resigned as a director of Legal Protection Group and ICS, is one of several subsequent brushes with the authorities.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

💰💦Early in 2017, STM’s Gibraltar offices received a visit from local regulators, Later that year they told STM they were “fundamentally concerned” about its compliance with anti-money-laundering rules, according to Gibraltar court filings.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌Particularly troubling to the regulators was the use of STM services to invest pension savings in the Trafalgar Multi Asset Fund, which collapsed in 2016 and is now under investigation by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

Oct 2017, Alan Kentish the CEO of STM Group was arrested by the Royal Gibraltar Police under the Proceeds of Crime Act. They were investigating whether he had failed to notify the authorities of potential money-laundering by one of STM’s clients. 💰💦
opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

It wasn’t just Gibraltar.

📌In 2015, STM became the first company in Jersey to be prosecuted for money-laundering compliance failures.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌STM was managing operations for Henley & Partners, whose business includes helping rich foreign nationals acquire citizenship of tax havens in return for investment—and whose chairman Christian Kalin reportedly has ties to CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌Christian Kalin, a Swiss lawyer, who has set up a number of controversial “citizenship for investment” schemes which offer passports to the wealthy.

📌Evidence suggests Mr Kalin was involved in the SCL’s campaign for the New Democratic Party in 2010
thetimes.co.uk/article/cambri…

📌In 2010, STM had used its Henley business to help a Ukrainian politician apply for a passport in St Kitts and Nevis.

source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌Viacheslav Suprunenko, son-in-law of the mayor of Kiev and brother of a senior figure in the Moscow-backed Party of Regions, was at the time wanted by Interpol for assault during armed robbery to recover documents in a business dispute.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

📌When Suprunenko asked STM to route his payments through offshore vehicles apparently unconnected to him, the company was suspicious enough to refuse the transactions—but failed to report them to the authorities.
source-material.org/blog/brexit-s-…

🔑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 EC probes into the source of Banks’s £8.4M in donations to the Leave campaign, the role of Kentish & others—who presided over the bailout & were in a position to know where the money came from—may offer new clues to how Brexit was financed.
opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

Since July 2018, the National Crime Agency has been seeking to determine if Bank’s £8m donation to Leave. EU is an illegal offshore donation and to identify it's origin.

📌This donation is said to be the biggest political donation in British History.
brexituncovered.blogspot.com/2019/03/new-ev…

🔑A sense of urgency attended the National Crime Agency’s investigation, in part because of widespread fears in the U.K. that foreign actors had meddled in the Brexit vote.
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

Putin has claimed that Russia was ambivalent about the Brexit referendum, <sure Jan> he recently pressed May to “fulfill the will” of the British people & rule out a second referendum on the UK’s membership in the EU.

Putin = divide & conquer = weaken EU
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

🔑Moreover, several authorities on Russian foreign policy argue that

🔑PUTIN’s INTERESTS ARE SQUARELY ALIGNED WITH THE LEAVE MOVEMENT.

🔑Putin, they maintain, considers it strategically useful to weaken European alliances,
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

Putin is thrilled to cause uncertainty and tumult in Britain, which has been at odds with Russia on a range of issues.

In 2016, for instance, RU was under sanctions from both the EU & the US for its annexation of Crimea.

Goal = Repeal the Magnitsky Act
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1147614210660028416?s=21

🔑3/19: Channel 4 News revealed Arron Banks sought RU investments into his businesses, in particular his Company actively attempted to secure a preferential deal worth billions which originally came via ALEXANDER YAKOVENKO the Russian Ambassador to the UK.
brexituncovered.blogspot.com/2019/03/new-ev…

5/4/18: 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…

📌In line with the Kremlin, Yakovenko, long denied the Kremlin tried to hack computers and murdered ex-spy Skirpal.
reuters.com/article/us-bri…

@threadreaderapp unroll please and thank you!

#Banks
#STM
#SouthernRock
#Yakovenko
#Kentish
#LeaveEU
#Brexit
#PanamaPapers
#BVI

#PRIHoldings
#ElizabethBilney
#MossackFonseca
#Gibraltar
#ICSRiskSolutions
#LegalProtectionGroup
#Scot24
#HenleyAndPartners
#ChristianKalin
#sCL
#CambridgeAnaytica
#Passports
#ViacheslavSuprunenko
#YakovenkoSovietSpy
#Skirpal
#Putin