Boris Johnson’s PR Guru Advising Firm Whose Founder Worked with Putin’s Top Energy Crony

A tangled web of influence from Gazprom to the Conservative Party to GB News – at its epicentre is a Tory PR lobbyist who played a key role in Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign

Downing Street has refused to deny whether Boris Johnson and other Cabinet ministers have remained in contact with a senior Conservative Party lobbyist giving PR advice to a controversial investment firm – the founder of which was praised by sanctioned Russian oligarch and Vladimir Putin ally, Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller.

The lobbyist previously helped Johnson win the leadership of the Conservative Party, and is now involved in redefining its direction by providing PR support for a wide range of Conservative Party groups – including a new effort by rebel ringleader MP Steve Baker to remake the Conservative Party by relaunching the Thatcherite pressure group, ‘Conservative Way Forward’ (CWF).

But perhaps most significantly, Byline Times can reveal that the firm’s billionaire founder, Christopher Chandler, was praised by Alexei Miller – a close ally of Vladimir Putin, following a personal meeting with the Gazprom chief in 2003.

Miller praised Chandler’s investment vehicle at the time, Sovereign Asset Management, for helping “Gazprom to reinforce its position among leading international energy companies”.

In return, Chandler’s brother, Richard Chandler, showered praise on Gazprom for “remarkable progress” that would create “significant shareholder value” and make the Putin-controlled gas giant “a core holding for international investment portfolios”.

At the meeting, Gazprom and the Chandler brothers affirmed their “commitment to common goals”.

Christopher Chandler now holds a controlling stake in GB News, the star TV host of which is former UKIP, ‘Leave.EU’ and Brexit Party politician Nigel Farage. He has defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and complained about British sanctions on Russian oligarchs.

From 2010 to 2014, Farage appeared on the state-controlled Russia Today (now RT) channel a total of 17 times. According to RT’s own literature, “he has been known far longer to the RT audience than most of the British electorate”.

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The Lobbyist

Ed Barker is a Conservative communications strategist who provides PR advice for a range of Conservative Party groups – including Steve Baker’s ‘COVID Recovery Group’ and Ben Bradley and Esther McVey’s ‘Blue Collar Conservativism Group’ consisting of 160 members, making it the largest caucus in the Conservative Party.

According to the parliamentary register of interests, Ed Barker is now providing strategic campaign advice to Steve Baker for the “coming relaunch of Conservative Way Forward” – work that is being funded by Neil Record, chairman of the hard-Brexit think tank, the Institute for Economic Affairs.

During its campaign to bring Boris Johnson to power, CWF was controlled by pro-Trump lobbyists involved in an organisation directly linked to Cambridge Analytica, the disgraced data analytics firm that used disinformation to influence the 2016 Donald Trump and Brexit elections. Under Baker’s chairmanship, CWF will now aim to “redefine a free-market conservatism for the future”.

Apart from having played a key role in Johnson’s leadership campaign, Ed Barker also provided PR support to Home Secretary Priti Patel and Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg. In 2019, he stood as a Conservative Party parliamentary candidate for Derby South, for which he received backing from Patel.

Before that, he had masterminded PR for several major hard-Brexit campaigns including ‘Leave Means Leave’ – run by Richard Tice and Nigel Farage – and StandUp4Brexit.

Barker has also provided PR support for the COVID-19 disinformation lobby network, ‘UsforThem’, which – as Byline Times has previously revealed – works closely with a number of anti-vaccine COVID denial groups such as the HART network.

Since then, Barker has gone on to provide PR support for the Dubai-based Legatum Group founded by Christopher Chandler, a billionaire from New Zealand who made his fortune helping Gazprom become a profitable energy giant under Vladimir Putin’s watch. Barker is simultaneously providing PR support for the Legatum Institute.

Christopher Chandler has claimed that the Legatum Institute operates entirely independently from the Legatum Group.

The role of Boris Johnson’s erstwhile PR guru in running communications for both will raise new questions about the Legatum Group’s control over its supposedly independent think tank, as well as Legatum’s broader relationship with the Conservative Party.

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Legatum: From Russia to Brexit

From around late 2021, the websites of both the Legatum Group and the Legatum Institute describe Ed Barker as the main point of contact for media enquiries, with the latter describing Barker as the Legatum Institute’s director of communications.

Some years ago, Legatum Group founder Christopher Chandler came under scrutiny following press stories revealing that he and his brother Richard had made their fortunes in Russia as shareholders in the Russian state-controlled gas giant Gazprom, through their firm Sovereign Global, which also operated as Sovereign Asset Management.

Although Chandler vehemently denies any links with Putin or the Kremlin, the Mail on Sunday found promotional material published by his own brother’s company, Clermont Global, claiming that Sovereign had “teamed up with Putin to launch a management coup at Gazprom”.

According to the Clermont Global brochure, the Chandlers’ firm Sovereign Global had “appointed Boris Fyodorov, Russia’s former minister of finance, to the board of directors of Gazprom”, reported The Times. “But Gazprom’s management resisted change, and so ‘Sovereign appealed directly to President Vladimir Putin’, and a ‘close ally’ of Mr Putin then replaced the chief executive of Gazprom in 2001.”

At the time of the revelations, Legatum denied this account, attributing it to Richard Chandler’s struggle to “recollect events” that had occurred “17 years ago”. Clermont told the Mail that the passages had been written in error using a “shorthand” to describe Sovereign’s engagement with Gazprom.

However, an article published on the Legatum Group’s website in 2018 throws further light on the Chandlers’ intimate involvement in Russia.

Sovereign “saw Russia as a country rich in resources and potential workforce, as aforementioned, but were awake to the fact that continued failure to implement good practice would result in potential catastrophe”, the article said.