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It took Nigel Farage more than two weeks to finally respond to Nathan Gill’s conviction for eight counts of bribery for taking payments from a pro-Russian Ukrainian MP and close associate of one of Putin’s closest allies, Viktor Medvedchuk.
Speaking on the campaign trail in Caerphilly for a forthcoming Senedd byelection, Farage said he was “stunned” that his close associate had taken bribes: “I’m the only one [in Reform] that really knew him, going back a long way.”
Despite Farage’s concession, after multiple denials from Reform UK, that he was close to Gill, the admission only raises more questions.
Farage’s claim that he was the “only one” in Reform UK who knew Gill contradicts the information Byline Times has received from former MEPs that Gill and Tice worked closely together during the Brexit Party era.
‘Thick as Thieves’: Nathan Gill and Nigel Farage’s Putin Problem
Far from being distant from the Reform UK Leader, insiders told Byline Times that the former MEP convicted of bribery was one of Farage’s closest aides, while we reveal how Gill worked on the Kremlin’s strategic plan to crush Ukrainian independence with ‘Moscow’s Man in Ukraine’
Meanwhile, the Reform UK leader’s denial that he knew anything about Gill’s pro-Russian activities in Ukraine is even more problematic.
“I didn’t know anything about it, all I knew was that he’d been to Ukraine,” he told BBC Wales. “I told him not to go; he defied me and went. I was completely unaware of any statements that he made.”
Byline Times has been told by various sources over the years that Farage has maintained a close interest in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia, as the public record of his comments about it can attest.
At a plenary session of the EU Parliament on 16 September 2014, after the invasion of East Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, both Gill and Farage made nearly identical statements claiming an ‘uprising’ had overthrown the “democratically elected Pro-Russian President”, Viktor Yanukovych, and criticising the EU for supporting the Maidan Revolution.
But Farage’s ignorance of this particular set of pro-Russian influencers around Nathan Gill is even more specific and questionable.
Oleh Voloshyn, indicted as Gill’s paymaster and loyal servant to Putin’s close ally, Viktor Medvedchuk, was married to another employee of the pro-Russian media mogul’s TV channels, Nadia Borodi.
Also known as Nadia Sass, Borodi worked as a presenter on Medvedchuk’s Channel 112 and has been described as a “Russian propagandist” by the French investigative news site Desk Russie
On 12 December 2018, within six days of receiving his first bribe to spread pro-Kremlin messages, Nathan Gill addressed a plenary session of the EU Parliament about an EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. He specifically spoke up to criticise the Ukrainian government for threatening to ban Medvedchuk’s TV stations Channel 112 and NewsOne for pro-Russian propaganda.
“The Ukrainian Government is in the process of banning the two biggest TV channels in the country, Channel 112 and NewsOne, and proper democratic procedures are being ignored four months before an election,” he told the Parliament: “How can this be: that the President of Ukraine can potentially close down independent media just before an election?”
However, Gill did not declare that he was in the pay of Medvedchuk’s associates, who filmed him on Medvedchuk’s live station NewsOne.
As if that wasn’t enough, Gill followed up his major parliamentary intervention with an interview with Channel 112 correspondent Nadia Borodi outside the media wall of the EU Parliament.
Wearing the same outfit, but without the microphone, Borodi snapped herself with Farage outside the European Parliament on what appears to be the same day.
She retweeted this image on X last year with the message: “I will still miss @Nigel_Farage and his team there. No one has ever rattled the Brussels swamp as he did.”
Any doubt that this was just a passing selfie is dispelled by another photo, taken by Borodi, also apparently on the same day, in which Farage is holding up a unique T-shirt celebrating Brexit with a James Bond reference: “Leave and Let Die”.
Note who retweeted it.
Sources have identified the location as Nathan Gill’s Strasbourg office, and the diary schedule of ‘NG’ on the calendar behind him on the wall definitively places this photograph in mid-December 2018.
Farage now admits that he knew Gill well, but claims to have been “completely unaware” of his statements on Ukraine. But this new lack of awareness feels as flimsy as the first.
Here Farage is, in Gill’s office, with Oleh Voloshyn’s wife Nadia, on the day Gill makes an intervention on behalf of Medvedchuk’s channels, with an employee of one of those channels, whose husband just started bribing Gill to make these statements six days earlier.
It strains credibility to believe that Farage did not ask who this woman was and – given the subsequent photograph in Gill’s office – was not aware of Nathan Gill’s statements in defence of her and her boss Medvedchuk’s TV stations in the EU Parliament that day.
Gill accepted payments for the next six months and became so close to Medvedchuk’s media empire he even joined its editorial board. Given his micromanaging of his MEPs and his closeness to Gill, how could Farage not have known this. And it beggars belief that he had no idea his his closest aide then hosted a roundtable with Medvedchuk ‘Putin’s Man in Ukraine’, in July 2019, to launch a peace plan which, which was so important Medvedchuk went to Moscow the next day to meet and get the endorsement of President Putin himself?
As sources have told Byline Times, it is “inconceivable” that Farage was unaware of Gill’s statements.