Who is Arron Banks – the bad boy of Brexit? | News | World



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If the British and American media reports have something to do, before 2014, few people outside the British private sector knew the name of Arron Banks – until he and his pals are known as Brexiteers – to the US investigation by the special advocate Robert Mueller on the interference of Russia in the US presidential election of November 2016.

The BBC is now reporting an investigation by the British Electoral Commission, a British parliamentary committee, to investigate allegations of Russian interference, false news, irregularities in Spending and Misuse of Private Data by Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit Campaign

businessman began his journey to notoriety by donating, in October 2014, a million pounds to the UK Independent Party (Ukip), a eurosceptic, right-wing and racist political psychologist. arty. The Bristol Post reported that Banks was previously a Conservative Party donor, but announced that he would rather donate to Ukip because former Conservative leader William Hague had said that He had never heard of him.

The donation to the group, which had been rejected by the Conservatives as a backward racist who could barely win a seat in Parliament, allowed Ukip not to faint and begin a more focused campaign on Brexit.

The chubby and beneficent G & T aficionado was described by the British media as the "main figure" in various anti-EU campaigns, including Grassroots Out and Leave.EU, as well as the official campaign of Vote Leave.

Banks' close relationship with the leader of Ukip, Nigel Farage, quickly made it a key figure of Ukip and the Guardian reported that it was part of of the group that President-elect Donald Trump had hosted at the Trump Tower shortly after his election victory. 2016.

The father of five, with a declared net worth of £ 250 million (in November 2017) was born in Northwich, Cheshire. The New Statesman says that he was raised mainly by his mother as his father ran farms in various African countries. He was expelled from two different schools for "an accumulation of offenses", including the sale of lead, stolen from school buildings and other "imprudent misconduct".

The Spectator declared his second wife Katya – a former gymnast and model whom he married in 2001 – was born in Russia.

Like Trump, Banks is a "superuser" on Twitter, which often encourages anti-leave activists and journalists to turn into twars.

The Negro and the Russians

It all started with his own revelation: He revealed in his memoirs that the Bad Boys of Brexit him and his friend Brexit Andy Wigmore – a former diplomat and business man – had "six o'clock" But it must be said that Banks was forced to admit that the contacts were more extensive than what had been said before. "

Emails were disclosed to British newspapers The Observer and the Sunday Times revealed Banks They said they had much deeper contacts with Russian officials than he initially claimed.Email – Banks claims – were stolen. The reporters say that they got them from an alert launcher.

The Guardian stated that the correspondence shows that he met with the lighter. Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom, Alexander Yakovenko, three is rather than once.The phone number of Trump's transition team with the Russians, and that he was offered a place in a gold mining agreement in Russia. even though we do not know if he accepted the offer.

Banks and Wigmore also met with Ambassador Yakovenko in November, when the agreement on gold was mentioned, and a year later, three days after visiting Trump Tower. The revelations also raise questions as to whether he has conveyed sensitive political information at these three meetings. He said no. E-mails from Banks and key associates were collected by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who wrote The Bad Boys of Brexit a diary of the pre-referendum period on the EU. Oakeshott, described by the Daily Beast as a pro-Brexit journalist, allegedly concealed evidence of links between Russia and the Brexit campaign while downplaying so-called conspiracy theories in television interviews.

Oakeshott collected e-mails as part of Instead of alerting the authorities to what was contained in the emails, Oakeshott kept them secret, saying that she only realized their importance when she continued to work with Banks and that she planned to publish them at a later date as part of a book she was working on. Oakeshott claims that some of his emails were hacked, but this was denied by others who obtained them.

Money from Wannabe moneymaker

Where did Banks get money to become a political donor? openDemocracy said that in January 2015, an estimate of its fortune was 100 million pounds sterling. In November 2017, an estimate of £ 250 million began to circumnavigate. The banks reportedly began his career when he was offered a junior job at Lloyd's of London, a British retail and commercial bank with branches across England and Wales, even though had never received formal tertiary education. whose CEO Elizabeth Bilney was in charge at Leave.EU, and where Andy Wigmore is also a director. The company's profits jumped to 16.7 million pounds in the first half of 2017, which Banks attributes to the company having been transformed by the same artificial intelligence technology used in the Brexit campaign.

Banks claims to hold a controlling interest in a diamond mine in Kimberley, South Africa, and a mining license in Lesotho

openDemocracy – an independent global media platform – conducted research in depth on Banks' financial affairs. , "The value of his businesses is materially lower than that of Banks." He is also wondering about how he could afford important contributions to the holiday campaign.

The complicated financial arrangements of banks are partly supported by companies located in various tax havens, including Gibraltar, the British Virgin Islands and the Isle of Man. Businessman Jim Mellon, he owns a bank. In the United Kingdom, Companies House records seem to show that Banks has set up 37 different companies using slight variations of its own name.

All this makes it difficult to determine the origin of the money that he used to "buy" the Brexit campaign

. Banks often claims that he operates an insurance company. However, an openDemocracy report says it was banned by the UK Financial Conduct Authority from running its own insurance company after a report from the Gibralter Financial Services Commission "failures serious and widespread "

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