Brexit

#Brexit campaigner #ArronBanks downplays Russia meetings

Published

8 years ago

June 14, 2018

Arron Banks (pictured), a British businessman who bankrolled one of the main Brexit campaigns, played down his links to the Kremlin on Tuesday (12 June), saying his meetings with Russian officials happened before Britain’s relations with Russia soured, write Alistair Smout and Sarah Young.

Banks, who financed the Leave.EU campaign, said he had merely passed a telephone number for President Donald Trump’s transition team to the UK Russian ambassador, and that all contacts with Russia had been disclosed to the U.S. embassy.

Britain has said it has seen no evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union.

But as part of a broader inquiry into “fake news,” lawmakers on the media committee are investigating whether Moscow tried to influence public opinion before the referendum.

Banks said he had two lunches with the Russian ambassador and one meeting with someone he was introduced to, but that was before the recent deterioration in relations with Russia after Britain accused it of being behind a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in England three months ago.

“What I’m saying is we’ve now got a full-scale Russian witch hunt going on. Now, before that all occurred, it was no issue,” he said of the meetings.

“I’ve got no business interests in Russia and I’ve done no business deals in Russia.”

The grilling came after the Sunday Times said Banks’ contacts there went further and deeper than he had previously disclosed.

The paper said the ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, had offered him the chance to join a complex Russian gold-mining deal.

But Banks said on Tuesday that although he had been interested, he had not pursued it.

He also said his visas and passport documents showed he was not in Moscow in February 2016, as the newspaper had claimed.

The lawmakers are also investigating Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy at the centre of a scandal over the misuse of millions of Facebook users’ data.

Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica have both said the political consultancy pitched to the campaign, but that no work was actually undertaken, a conclusion also drawn by the Electoral Commission’s investigation into the matter.

Banks reiterated the point on Tuesday and said the claims against him had come from people whom he did not regard as credible witnesses.

Banks has become a bete noire for pro-EU campaigners, who presented him with pies on his arrival in Westminster. Pork pies is an old London rhyming slang term for “lies”, but Banks and Wigmore smiled and posed with the pies before eating them.

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