‘Posh George’, Two Passports, and a Fraudulent Identity: Convicted Fraudster and Nigel Farage Funder’s Connections to Reform UK’s Murky Financial Structures

George Cottrell, the convicted aristocrat who has funded Nigel Farage and Reform UK, influenced the party’s finances and corporate structure through an apparent act of identity fraud, an investigation by Byline Times reveals.

Cottrell – known as ‘Posh George’ – has lurked at the heart of Farage’s political operations for a decade.

In 2016, he was Farage’s chief of staff and UKIP’s treasurer and chief fundraiser.

By 2019 – despite his criminal conviction for fraud in the United States – Cottrell became a fundraiser for Farage’s successor political outfit, the Brexit Party.

More recently, Cottrell has funded both Farage and Reform, with many of his gifts and donations going undeclared and now the subject of police and parliamentary investigations.

Byline Times‘ findings can now establish further details about George Cottrell’s dealings in the world of corporate finance and Farage’s politics.

Based on analysis of hundreds of company records, official documents, archived webpages, and sources familiar with his school days and his work in the City, this investigation reveals:

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Donations and Restructures

The donations made by George Cottrell and his mother Fiona Cottrell have attracted significant scrutiny in recent weeks.

Reform accepted two donations of £250,000 from Fiona Cottrell, George Cottrell’s mother, in May 2024. In June, she sent a further £1 million to Britain Means Business – Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice’s private fundraising vehicle, which donated half of it to Reform.

These are now the subject of criminal investigations by the Metropolitan Police and the National Crime Agency, which has been unable to trace the money’s ultimate source. The law makes it an offence to evade political donation restrictions by concealing or disguising the true source of a donation or by giving false information about a donation.

Responsibility for screening these donations lay with Mehrtash A’zami. As Reform’s treasurer for six years, he was legally responsible for ensuring that every donation above £500 was recorded; checking within 30 days whether it came from a permissible source; returning anything impermissible or unidentifiable; and filing the party’s statutory donation reports.

That responsibility ended abruptly on 19 February 2025, during a wholesale restructuring of the party in the same month that the Electoral Commission referred Fiona Cottrell’s donations to the police.

Until then, Reform had operated through a private company owned by three named shareholders: Nigel Farage held nine of its 15 voting shares, Richard Tice held five and A’zami held one. On 19 February, all 15 shares were transferred to a newly created company limited by guarantee—the non-share structure commonly used by non-profit organisations. The old company was renamed Reform 2025 Ltd and retained as the new company’s wholly owned subsidiary.

The change removed Farage, Tice and A’zami as named owners but in reality no control was passed to Reform’s wider membership: those who now hold voting rights in the new parent company are not publicly identified. It also left the party operating through two companies able to hold and transfer money between them, making its finances harder to trace.

So how did Mehrtash A’zami become Reform’s treasurer in the first place? And why did he leave the position?

The answer requires a trip to a Reform corporate cluster in Tivat, Montenegro – and to an obscure global accountancy network headquartered in London.

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Network Connections

According to George Cottrell, he obtained his first job in the City thanks to a London accountant.

Byline Times has established that this man was Mehrtash A’zami, who had hired him as a consultant more than a decade ago – under a false identity known as ‘Oscar Drewitt’.

This fraudulent relationship allowed Cottrell hidden influence over the corporate structure of Reform UK Party Ltd before its sudden reorganisation in February 2025: the man Reform UK entrusted with vetting the party’s donations, including from Cottrell himself and his own mother, had known Cottrell since he was a teenager and had once hired him. The safeguard the law relies on, that a donation’s permissibility is checked by someone independent of the donor, did not exist.

Hon Kong Yong, a British Malaysian accountant and fellow gambler Cottrell met at a casino, introduced Cottrell to the McMillan Woods corporate services network, under the alias.

A’zami was an early partner of this network. The recommendation helped Cottrell secure a consulting role under A’zami within that network.

For years, Cottrell was not known by his real name but as ‘Oscar’ – matching a Swiss passport found in his possession in 2014, two years before his arrest in the United States for money laundering and wire fraud.

Yong was himself already a fixture of the network and was personally known to its senior figures for a number of years. Today, he owns the Montenegro casino George Cottrell frequents, and the flat Cottrell lives in there – wealth that nothing in Yong’s own financial history can explain.

Though responsible for financial governance of Reform, including vetting donations, when he became the party’s treasurer in 2019, A’zami was – at the same time – a director of a Montenegrin company, which operated inside the same corporate infrastructure as the casino and crypto-gambling network surrounding George Cottrell and owned by Hon Kong Yong.

Throughout this tenure at Reform, A’zami was also a partner in the McMillan Woods accounting group, the directors of which had worked with A’zami, Cottrell, and Yong a decade earlier.

Reform UK, Mehrtash A’zami, and McMillan Woods did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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‘Private Family Office’

George Cottrell moved to Montenegro in late 2019, shortly after Mehrtash A’zami joined Reform.

Cottrell established a company, Private Family Office, and lived in a penthouse in the Regent complex above Tivat harbour, owned by Global Trust Ltd – the same company that owns the Salon Privé casino, where he gambles regularly in the VIP room, and which is controlled by Hon Kong Yong.

Registered in January 2020 with Cottrell as its sole owner, Private Family Office has seen its accumulated deficit grow from approximately €79,000 in 2020 to €465,638 by 2025 – on near-zero revenue and a single employee, and sustained by more than €400,000 in loans from unidentifiable sources.

Cottrell’s lawyers refused to explain to Byline Times the loans’ origins or the source of his wealth, saying only that it is “entirely unsurprising” that his company fails to “generate any revenue” as it is “established for administrative functions”.

They also describe him merely as a tenant of Yong’s penthouse. But two people who worked for Cottrell held official roles at Yong’s company at the same time.

Gustaf Sander ran Private Family Office between November 2020 and October 2022, while simultaneously serving as organisational director of Salon Privé – a role in which he signed a sponsorship deal with local football club FK Arsenal Tivat in June 2022.

Cottrell’s lawyers have provided shifting accounts of Sander’s position: first denying that he held any role at Salon Privé; then telling the Financial Times that the two roles were not held at the same time; before reverting to denial and claiming that the football club’s sponsorship record was “incorrect”. The sponsorship deal was, however, confirmed by the administrative body governing Tivat, which published a photo of it.

Katarina Đurović served on Private Family Office’s board from February 2024 to April 2025, while simultaneously working on her own account as Global Trust’s “treasury and payments associate” handling its crypto payment processing.

Cottrell’s lawyers described her only as “an authorised representative appointed by the professional advisors” to his company.

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The Shared Tivat Accounting Network

Around the same period, a number of Reform figures began setting up shop in Tivat – using the same Tivat accountancy office, Global Financial Solutions, which also runs Yong’s entire corporate group: Global Trust and everything it owns, including Salon Privé; the Sidra 501 company that holds George Cottrell’s flat; a bar; a security company; and a restaurant company.

One of these figures was Reform’s treasurer, Mehrtash A’zami, who set up his Montenegrin company, Maxim Enterprise d.o.o.

The same address it is based at also houses companies belonging to Christopher Harborne, Reform’s largest individual donor who gave Farage a £5 million gift; Gawain Towler, its former communications chief; and Samee Bhatti, its former digital strategist, who also set up the website for George Cottrell’s unlimited company, Geostrategy.

Global Financial Solutions is owned by Nino Pantović, who also owns a separate legal-services company, MNE Law, based at the same address. His late father, Ratko Pantović, who died in December 2024, was the lawyer for both George Cottrell and Hon Kong Yong.

Nino Pantović has travelled on Cottrell’s private jet. Montenegrin company records show that he personally filed the paperwork transferring ownership of Cottrell’s firm, Private Family Office, to Gustaf Sander in October 2020 – submitting both men’s passports and Cottrell’s Montenegrin personal identification number to the state registry.

Cottrell’s lawyers told Byline Times: “Tivat is a small coastal town with a small community. It is therefore entirely unremarkable that individuals and organisations should use the same advisors.”

Hon Kong Yong’s lawyers said they “do not accept that the use of the same accounting or corporate services provider, without more, establishes any business relationship, common ownership, common control, coordination, or wrongdoing”.

One thing these companies share is losses.

Yong’s Global Trust shows a rapidly expanding asset portfolio, including the flat where George Cottrell resides, funded by nowhere near enough revenue of its own. It has accumulated €7.46 million in short-term liabilities.

Yet, Reform UK’s treasurer Mehrtash A’zami had crossed paths with George Cottrell long before A’zami established Maxim Enterprise in Montenegro – years before either had met Nigel Farage.

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Gold and Oil

Contrary to the commonly cited account that George Cottrell was schooled on the private island of Mustique, he in fact attended The Elms School in Colwall, Herefordshire, before moving to Malvern College for his ‘A’ Levels.

As a student, Cottrell ran a clandestine poker ring after school and smuggled alcohol onto the premises. He had ambitions of grandeur even then, a school friend who knew him for 10 years told Byline Times.

Those around him expected “he would do something big, that it would probably be illegal, and that he would somehow talk his way into power,” the source said. Through his lawyers, Cottrell denied smuggling alcohol into the school.

From the age of 14, according to the source, Cottrell was already setting up companies in Luxembourg – inactive shells with no real business behind them. At one point, Cottrell was importing gold from China. The source recalled once seeing him at a train station with a gold bar in his pocket stamped with Chinese markings.

The former school friend also told Byline Times that, after he was expelled from Malvern College over gambling and drug use, Cottrell became friends with Arkadiy Abramovich – son of the now-sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich – and was open about the friendship at the time. This corroborates separate reporting by The Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr that a relative of Cottrell’s confirmed that he was a teenage friend of Arkadiy Abramovich.

This investigation has established that George Cottrell’s relationship with Arkadiy Abramovich blossomed in the period after Cottrell had left school and was trying to find work, some time between 2010 and 2012. It was during this time that Cottrell posted a photograph of the pair together on Facebook.

“To Mr Cottrell’s knowledge, he has never even met Arkadiy Abramovich,” Cottrell’s lawyers told Byline Times. “Our client does not have (nor has he ever had) any relationship with any member of the Abramovich family.”

Arkadiy Abramovich was, by then, starting to build his own investment empire.

As early as August 2011, aged 17, he was pursuing oil and gas acquisitions across Russia and the former Soviet Union through his investment company ARA Capital and the London-listed shell company Zoltav Resources.

Cottrell, then, already had a personal connection to a family at the centre of Russian oil money by the time Mehrtash A’zami hired him.

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‘A Childhood Friend’

In 2007, Mehrtash A’zami was a partner in the McMillan Woods accounting group – a global network of accountancy firms founded in Malaysia and headquartered in London.

That year, he set up Maxim Management Consulting LLP to provide mergers and acquisitions consulting to the McMillan Woods group.

Hon Kong Yong had been known to the McMillan Woods inner circle for many years. According to a former partner of the firm, who spoke to Byline Times on the condition of anonymity and who works as a senior statutory auditor, Yong first met Cottrell at a London casino. Yong then introduced Cottrell into the network as a young businessman by the name of ‘Oscar Drewitt’.

Cottrell was known to McMillan Woods senior partners as “Yong’s friend ‘Oscar’”, due to the regularity with which they were seen together at City events.

And it was Yong’s recommendation which helped Cottrell secure his first job – with Mehrtash A’zami.

Around 2012, A’zami hired Cottrell as a consultant at his firm Maxim.

Cottrell’s other boss at Maxim was the firm’s chair, who was simultaneously a senior director of McMillan Woods and one of the latter’s original co-founders.

But what they did not know at the time was that they were hiring George Cottrell. They believed they were hiring Oscar Drewitt.

At Maxim, Cottrell began to cut his teeth on how to manage and move large sums of money for Mayfair clients, developing expertise in cross-border banking and discreet asset transfer. A’zami had lofty ambitions for his company and wanted to compete with major firms. Cottrell’s promises of contacts with big investors were highly attractive.

Under his pseudonym of Mr Drewitt, George Cottrell offered to bring in seed investment for third-party projects in exchange for a 10% fee. At one point, he persuaded A’zami to personally put up approximately £60,000, borrowed from friends and family. No investment materialised and A’zami never recovered the money. Cottrell denied that he ever took money from A’zami.

Maxim sat within the wider McMillan Woods accountancy network, and its directors set up a run of interlocking firms from shared offices, including by 2012 the offshoot firm Archer Wise Accountants and Auditors Limited, which offered auditing services for McMillan Woods clients.

Byline Times’ senior McMillan Woods source had known and worked with both George Cottrell and Hon Kong Yong. He confirmed that, during Cottrell’s consultancy at Maxim, he simultaneously joined Archer Wise as a consultant known as ‘Oscar’. Yong also joined the firm at around the same time.

Cottrell’s lawyers told Byline Times that “Cottrell knows Hon Kong Yong personally and they both live in the town of Tivat in Montenegro, which has a small expatriate community (the members of which are generally known to each other)”.

They did not mention that the two men had been connected for more than a decade earlier through the McMillan Woods network.

Yong’s lawyers told Byline Times that he “was not employed by McMillan Woods or by any entity within the McMillan Woods network” and that he “has no recollection of introducing Mr Cottrell to anyone in the McMillan Woods network, let alone doing so in circumstances where Mr Cottrell is alleged to have assumed a false identity”.

But company records confirm that, between December 2013 and March 2014, Hon Kong Yong was a director and shareholder at Archer Wise. Byline Times’ source confirmed that Yong was a consultant there for much longer, and knew him as a frequent, heavy gambler who smoked cannabis obsessively except during office hours.

According to the source, one day in 2014, staff including Hon Kong Yong had returned to the Archer Wise office to find the door damaged. It was unclear how or why, but it looked like a possible attempted break-in. Staff noticed that ‘Oscar’ had forgotten his bag inside and suspected that he had come back to retrieve it – raising suspicions of what may have been inside. So they decided to open the bag.

Inside Cottrell’s bag, they discovered two passports: a British passport in George Cottrell’s real name, and a Swiss passport under Oscar Drewitt. According to the source, Yong told those present at the discovery that he already knew of the two identities – and confirmed that George Cottrell was Cottrell’s real name.

It is already known that Cottrell has operated under at least three assumed identities.

Under the alias ‘Bill’, he advertised money-laundering services on a dark web marketplace – leading to his US conviction for wire fraud.

After his release, he registered his Montenegro company, Private Family Office, under the shortened name ‘George Co’, which has been linked to passports and bank transfers in that name.

He has also legally shortened his own surname to “Cotrel”, a change one judge has called deceptive. 

Archer Wise conducted money-laundering checks on the two passport identities found in the bag, and both were cleared by the UK Home Office and Swiss Embassy as genuine.

“As both authorities verified the passports were genuine, there were no other actions to be taken as we did not know the circumstances of him obtaining either passport,” said the former McMillan Woods partner. Yong was aware the checks had been carried out. “Being Yong’s friend [George Cottrell], it was just left at that,” the source added.

Cottrell’s lawyers denied to Byline Times that he had ever used a Swiss passport. They claimed instead that he “has a childhood friend called Oscar Drewitt” whose name or passport he “has never used”.

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Reform’s Treasurer and Its Structural Change

After the discovery of his Swiss passport, George Cottrell lost his consulting role at Archer Wise. But he continued to work at Maxim under Mehrtash A’zami while Hon Kong Yong continued at Archer Wise. At this time, it appears that Cottrell was still using his false identity.

That year, 2014, George Cottrell joined Nigel Farage’s UKIP as a fundraiser.

Then, in 2015 – approximately a year after his time at Archer Wise ended – his associate and gambling partner Hon Kong Yong filed for bankruptcy. Yong had been facing increasing financial difficulties. Eventually, the combination of gambling, subsidence damage to his home, and mortgage arrears meant that he could no longer pay off his debt. The bankruptcy ended his ability to work as an accountant, and he also had to leave Archer Wise.

“No one knew what happened to Hon after that,” the senior accountant who had worked with him at the time told this publication. “We lost touch with him. Some of us thought he might have died.”

But in 2018, Yong was discharged from his bankruptcy. Three years later, he surfaced in Tivat as the owner of the Salon Privé casino, a luxury apartment, and a group of companies.

The former McMillan Woods partner was shocked to learn of Yong’s current position in Tivat: “I knew Yong, and I knew of his family and background. There was no way in which Yong would have been able to generate the income by himself to purchase a luxury casino or penthouse apartment in Montenegro.”

In 2015, George Cottrell had been promoted to UKIP’s head of fundraising and deputy treasurer. In 2016, he became Nigel Farage’s chief of staff.

But Cottrell was arrested by the FBI in July at a US airport as he travelled back from a Donald Trump campaign rally with Farage. Charged with multiple counts of money laundering, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, was jailed, and released in March 2017.

Two years later, in 2019, Farage’s Brexit Party needed a new treasurer. Cottrell had already returned to the scene as a fundraiser for the party by May. His fraud conviction, however, ruled him out from taking the formal senior position. His former boss, Mehrtash A’zami, was put forward – providing Cottrell with a foothold inside the party’s corporate structure. 

It is likely that Cottrell would have had to admit his real identity to A’zami. Byline Times cannot verify when or how this happened. But it is clear that Reform’s treasurer knew of Cottrell’s previous false identity.

Asked why A’zami would have accepted an invitation from Cottrell to become treasurer of Reform, the former McMillan Woods partner speculated that “Cottrell had lost all A’zami’s money. He owed him. Perhaps this was his way of paying him back”.

On 27 June 2019, Mehrtash A’zami joined Reform UK Party Ltd – then still trading as the Brexit Party – as a director, shareholder, and treasurer.

Archived webpages seen by Byline Times show that, two weeks later, he was publicly listed as a partner for corporate finance and capital markets at McMillan Woods – the group that had kickstarted Cottrell’s career as Oscar Drewitt.

Alongside A’zami were two other McMillan Woods partners – both of whom had also known Cottrell in around 2012 because they had worked with him at A’zami’s firm, Maxim.

For the next six years, Reform UK Party Ltd’s corporate governance would be managed by a man who would become embedded in a Montenegrin company infrastructure shared by a nexus of Reform figures and George Cottrell himself.

Everything changed when the Electoral Commission referred George Cottrell’s mother, Fiona Cottrell’s donations, to the police. That month, Nigel Farage announced the change in Reform’s structure.

Mehrtash A’zami disappeared from politics.

Farage and Tice remained directors of the old party private company, now renamed Reform 2025 Ltd – but it was placed beneath a new company limited by guarantee, Reform UK Party Limited.

Tice has no registered role in the new parent, whose directors are Farage, Peter Durnell (a climate science denier and anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist) and Harvey Griffiths (Reform’s new registered treasurer, a property investment mogul who champions private commercial solutions for the public sector across housing, the NHS and local authorities). But that does not reveal where ultimate corporate control can be found: the legal members who hold voting rights in the new company are not publicly identified.

Farage relinquished his personal majority shareholding, but emerged as the only director serving on both the parent and its subsidiary.

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‘A Blizzard of Bluster and Obfuscation’

Phil Brickell, the Labour MP who is Chair of the APPG on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, told Byline Times that while the leader of Reform UK “may have called this sham by-election [in his Clacton-on-Sea seat] to dodge scrutiny… the questions are still mounting for Nigel Farage.”

Brickell, who recently reported Farage to the Standards Commissioner over claims he allegedly lobbied Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey to drop plans for a state-led ‘Britcoin’ cryptocurrency, told Byline Times that the allegations made in our investigation “are incredibly serious”.

“What on earth is Nigel Farage doing associating with George Cottrell, who, in his own words, is “like a son” to him? Law enforcement must now be allowed to establish who knew what, and when,” Brickell said.

“Farage talks a lot about establishment stitch-ups. But if these allegations are substantiated, then what else could he call it? Time and time again we’re faced with a blizzard of bluster and obfuscation when it comes to Reform UK’s money.”

Brickell added that the suggestion that the company behind Reform UK restructured in 2025 to conceal its real ownership “doesn’t surprise me in the slightest”.

“Having worked in financial services compliance myself, the timing of the restructure, so soon after the police got involved, looks like a desperate attempt to cover Reform UK’s tracks.”

Additional reporting by Adam Bienkov and Josiah Mortimer