As I mentioned, Rees-Mogg met with Steve Bannon of Breitbart and Nigel Farage of UKIP last year. All three are prominent figures on the far-right with connections to Russia, as I laid out in my previous e-mail. It’s now emerged that the links between UKIP and Russian agents were even deeper than has been hitherto revealed. A Daily Beast article from May last year detailed the close relationship between UKIP and the hacker group Wikileaks, who appear to have been entirely subverted by Russia and played an instrumental role in the US elections. The article discusses internal UKIP memos which revealed that UKIP consulted with Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, on speeches the party gave to the European Parliament, that they attempted to send UKIP members to artificially generate protests when Assange appeared in court in London for extradition on rape charges, and that Farage and other senior members of the party met extensively with Assange’s lawyer to discuss the angle they should approach the case from. All this became more relevant with the revelations in mid-January at Glenn Simpson’s testimony to the US Senate. Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, who created the notorious ‘Steele dossier’ about links between Donald Trump and the Russian government, alleged that Nigel Farage had met with Julian Assange himself during his self-imposed imprisonment at the Ecuadorian embassy several times more than he had advertised, and had passed him a ‘thumb drive’ containing unknown contents in the leadup to the 2016 presidential election.
Meanwhile, it’s also been revealed that Rees-Mogg was not the only MP that met with Bannon on his trip to the UK. In a separate meeting, Bannon discussed Brexit with Daniel Kawczynski, MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham. Kawczynski is an interesting bird. Despite a few quirks (he voted to reduce the legal length of time allowable for women to have abortions, citing his Christian beliefs, and voted against a motion to decriminalise blasphemy, but was in favour of gay marriage – being openly bisexual himself might have helped with that) he has been, by and large, a loyal and reliable backbencher. His attendance rate at Commons votes is significantly above average, and he’s rarely rebelled against the whip – for comparison, Jacob Rees-Mogg rebelled 104 times during the 2010-2015 parliament, while Kawczynski only rebelled 17 times. By and large, then, he’s a fairly generic Tory, certainly not the kind of alt-right nutter you’d expect to be in the same circles as Bannon and Farage.
A clue to what this was all about, though, may be found in the other most important aspect of Kawczynski as a parliamentarian – namely, that he’s dirty as hell. The blogger and Conservative insider Paul Staines accuses him of using unpaid interns to ghost-write his books on Saudi Arabia and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, noting the considerable disparity of writing styles within the Gaddafi book and the fact that prospective ‘researchers’ were asked to submit five-thousand-word essays that bore curious similarities to the chapters in the finished product. He admitted to approaching a young female researcher in 2013 and pressuring her to have dinner with a wealthy businessman of his acquaintance. He complained that expense measurements were ‘skewed’ after it was found that he was one of the highest claimants in 2012.
Most relevantly to this report, though, he has a habit of cosying up to unpleasant, repressive, and thoroughly corrupt regimes, as one might expect for one of the MPs who was willing to publicly defend then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox for bringing along a business partner without any security clearance on foreign diplomatic visits. The most famous is Saudi Arabia – he has in fact gained the Parliamentary nickname of the ‘Honourable Member for Saudi Arabia’. He said that the book he intended to write (or have ghostwritten) about the country would be ‘the most pro-Saudi book ever written by a British politician. He pushed hard for the £5.9 billion deal for Britain to provide prison training advice to the KSA (which is notorious for the brutality of its penal/criminal justice system), and threw a tantrum when it was cancelled after 74-year-old Briton Karl Andree was sentenced to 350 lashes (functionally a death sentence) for violating local alcohol laws. Most infamously, he threatened to sue BBC Newsnight after an interview in which he attempted to dismiss and downplay Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen, which went about as well as you might expect. As you’ve probably guessed by now, though, the KSA is not the only nasty petrostate Kawczynski has gone to bat for – yep, he’s a big Russia booster.
In 2015, one year after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, Kawczynski wrote a piece on ConservativeHome arguing that sanctions for the illegal land-grab were ‘simply not practicable’ with a trading partner as important as Russia. In July 2016, a month after the Brexit referendum, he wrote another article for them about how leaving the EU was an ‘exciting opportunity’ to ‘take Anglo-Russian relations out of the freezer’, claiming that ‘growing voices from major British institutions, representing large numbers of British businesses and British commercial interests’ saw considerable opportunity for profit from letting bygones be bygones. In September of that year, he issued a statement to Russia Today complaining about the ‘narrow’ international perspective of the BBC and announcing his own intention to develop trade in the sectors not covered by the Crimea sanctions. In July 2017, a month after the general election, he spoke to Sputnik News, a relatively young Russian ‘counter-propaganda’ station that is known for quoting only a small selection of extremely pro-Russian politicians – Kawczynski shares the company of charming folks like the infamous far-right lunatic Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who claimed on Sputnik that Ukraine is more of an enemy to his native Poland than Russia. In his statement, he told Sputnik that May’s new government was going to ‘help to resolve the key outstanding issue between us which is Minsk II’. Minsk II is the current peace treaty between the Ukrainian government and the Russian-backed Donbass separatists. To borrow an old Simpsons joke, Kawczynski was saying the quiet part loud here – while Russia, along with other major powers like the US and EU, helped broker Minsk II and signed it, the Federation’s official stance is that it is not involved in Ukraine, so the treaty has no bearing on it. Funny that a pro-Russian MP should bring it up as evidence of the government’s increased friendliness to Russia, then.
So basically, what we have here is Steve Bannon, a far-right journalist/politician whose site appears to have actively worked with Russian bots to promote its stories, speaking with three British political figures. Only two of them, Rees-Mogg and Farage, shared his far-right political views. All of them, though, were in some way associated with Russia – remember that Rees-Mogg was described by Byline as ‘the new face of Russian interference in the UK’ (and Byline has since identified specific Russian botnets pushing Moggmentum). Hmm.
Meanwhile, it’s also been revealed that Rees-Mogg was not the only MP that met with Bannon on his trip to the UK. In a separate meeting, Bannon discussed Brexit with Daniel Kawczynski, MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham. Kawczynski is an interesting bird. Despite a few quirks (he voted to reduce the legal length of time allowable for women to have abortions, citing his Christian beliefs, and voted against a motion to decriminalise blasphemy, but was in favour of gay marriage – being openly bisexual himself might have helped with that) he has been, by and large, a loyal and reliable backbencher. His attendance rate at Commons votes is significantly above average, and he’s rarely rebelled against the whip – for comparison, Jacob Rees-Mogg rebelled 104 times during the 2010-2015 parliament, while Kawczynski only rebelled 17 times. By and large, then, he’s a fairly generic Tory, certainly not the kind of alt-right nutter you’d expect to be in the same circles as Bannon and Farage.
A clue to what this was all about, though, may be found in the other most important aspect of Kawczynski as a parliamentarian – namely, that he’s dirty as hell. The blogger and Conservative insider Paul Staines accuses him of using unpaid interns to ghost-write his books on Saudi Arabia and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, noting the considerable disparity of writing styles within the Gaddafi book and the fact that prospective ‘researchers’ were asked to submit five-thousand-word essays that bore curious similarities to the chapters in the finished product. He admitted to approaching a young female researcher in 2013 and pressuring her to have dinner with a wealthy businessman of his acquaintance. He complained that expense measurements were ‘skewed’ after it was found that he was one of the highest claimants in 2012.
Most relevantly to this report, though, he has a habit of cosying up to unpleasant, repressive, and thoroughly corrupt regimes, as one might expect for one of the MPs who was willing to publicly defend then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox for bringing along a business partner without any security clearance on foreign diplomatic visits. The most famous is Saudi Arabia – he has in fact gained the Parliamentary nickname of the ‘Honourable Member for Saudi Arabia’. He said that the book he intended to write (or have ghostwritten) about the country would be ‘the most pro-Saudi book ever written by a British politician. He pushed hard for the £5.9 billion deal for Britain to provide prison training advice to the KSA (which is notorious for the brutality of its penal/criminal justice system), and threw a tantrum when it was cancelled after 74-year-old Briton Karl Andree was sentenced to 350 lashes (functionally a death sentence) for violating local alcohol laws. Most infamously, he threatened to sue BBC Newsnight after an interview in which he attempted to dismiss and downplay Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen, which went about as well as you might expect. As you’ve probably guessed by now, though, the KSA is not the only nasty petrostate Kawczynski has gone to bat for – yep, he’s a big Russia booster.
In 2015, one year after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, Kawczynski wrote a piece on ConservativeHome arguing that sanctions for the illegal land-grab were ‘simply not practicable’ with a trading partner as important as Russia. In July 2016, a month after the Brexit referendum, he wrote another article for them about how leaving the EU was an ‘exciting opportunity’ to ‘take Anglo-Russian relations out of the freezer’, claiming that ‘growing voices from major British institutions, representing large numbers of British businesses and British commercial interests’ saw considerable opportunity for profit from letting bygones be bygones. In September of that year, he issued a statement to Russia Today complaining about the ‘narrow’ international perspective of the BBC and announcing his own intention to develop trade in the sectors not covered by the Crimea sanctions. In July 2017, a month after the general election, he spoke to Sputnik News, a relatively young Russian ‘counter-propaganda’ station that is known for quoting only a small selection of extremely pro-Russian politicians – Kawczynski shares the company of charming folks like the infamous far-right lunatic Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who claimed on Sputnik that Ukraine is more of an enemy to his native Poland than Russia. In his statement, he told Sputnik that May’s new government was going to ‘help to resolve the key outstanding issue between us which is Minsk II’. Minsk II is the current peace treaty between the Ukrainian government and the Russian-backed Donbass separatists. To borrow an old Simpsons joke, Kawczynski was saying the quiet part loud here – while Russia, along with other major powers like the US and EU, helped broker Minsk II and signed it, the Federation’s official stance is that it is not involved in Ukraine, so the treaty has no bearing on it. Funny that a pro-Russian MP should bring it up as evidence of the government’s increased friendliness to Russia, then.
So basically, what we have here is Steve Bannon, a far-right journalist/politician whose site appears to have actively worked with Russian bots to promote its stories, speaking with three British political figures. Only two of them, Rees-Mogg and Farage, shared his far-right political views. All of them, though, were in some way associated with Russia – remember that Rees-Mogg was described by Byline as ‘the new face of Russian interference in the UK’ (and Byline has since identified specific Russian botnets pushing Moggmentum). Hmm.
Brexit and Disaster Capitalism
Last time, I talked about ‘disaster capitalism’, the get-rich-quick scheme of identifying failing economies and then buying up their assets dirt-cheap after the crash, and how it relates to the hard Brexiteers. At the heart of this is the Legatum institute, the largest and most influential hard-Brexit think-tank, which was founded by the Chandler brothers of New Zealand. The Chandlers turned millions into billions through disaster capitalism in Brazil and Russia, and have given a few lectures on how to successfully engage in it. Since last time, though, a few more interesting details have emerged.
First off, Christopher Chandler and his family, plus Mark Stoleson, chief executive of Legatum, became naturalised citizens of Malta in 2016, around the time of the referendum. A weird move for someone lobbying for Britain to exit the EU, but it does put him in a prime position to benefit once the worryingly portable multinationals keeping Britain’s economy afloat start moving to EU cities like Frankfurt.
Second, a Channel 4/Times sting caught three Tory ex-ministers attempting to sell information on the Brexit negotiation process to a fictional Chinese company. Andrew Lansley, who is most notorious for tanking NHS England’s finances and then taking on a job advising private companies on healthcare investments in the UK, advised them to pay him through his wife’s company so that it wouldn’t show up on the transparency register. Andrew Mitchell, who in 2010 was accused of pressuring the Ghanaian government to lift a ban on a company accused of smuggling after said company donated £40,000 to him, said that ‘my constituents don’t mind what I’m paid’. Peter Lilley, an outspoken climate-change sceptic with £400,000 in petrochemical shares, pointed out to the disguised journalists that he sat on two Brexit advisory committees, which would make him particularly good at giving them advance notice of new plans and negotiating positions.
Regarding Rees-Mogg and Brexit, what I’ve found is intriguing. A year before the referendum, his business partner Dominic Johnson, chief executive of Somerset Capital management, did a column in the Telegraph about how Brexit would be advantageous for SCM and similar companies. He complains at length about the burden of EU regulations, particularly for ‘boutique’ firms like SCM who have a small, elite group of customers. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point what SCM specialises in. Their thing is ‘emerging markets’, rapidly-developing third-world countries who would be able to make far more advantageous trade deals with Britain once it’s no longer part of an immensely powerful collective-bargaining alliance (I do think that the parallels between the right-wingers’ vision of Brexit and the more conventional kind of union-busting go unremarked-upon too often). See also James Dyson, a prominent Brexiteer, whose company mainly operates from Singapore and Malaysia. In particular, Rees-Mogg’s infamous ‘good enough for India’ comment probably didn’t come out of nowhere. Somerset Capital Management’s first single-country emerging market portfolio, established in 2015, was for India – normally, EM portfolios cover multiple countries to spread out the risk, because developing countries can sometimes develop in very untoward ways, but Dominic Johnson said that “the direction of travel in India is very attractive, we like the liquidity in the market, and it has lots of depth. It has been a very important region for our investors.” Very important indeed, apparently.
One interesting little wrinkle, though, is that Brexit may actually prove quite damaging for asset-management firms like SCM. Basically, the problem is because of a concept called ‘delegation’. You put your funds in one country, ideally a tax haven like Switzerland or Luxembourg, and have someone from another country with a delegation deal run it. It means you’ve got a much more diverse and competitive range of asset managers to pick from. Of course, delegation is an expression of trust that your ludicrously wealthy elite will have their money safely taken care of, so the fact that Britain is seeking regulatory divergence from the EU is encouraging European lawmakers to suspend our delegation rights (and let asset managers in their own countries take up the slack, conveniently enough). In other words, SCM and companies like it are about to get shut off from a whole bunch of customers in EU tax havens. The best solution for them is to make UK tax havens even more attractive, and Chancellor Philip Hammond has already threatened to do this. That would probably invite an EU blacklist, though, so JRM and company might be in trouble. Probably worth looking at to see if they make any noises related to this.
First off, Christopher Chandler and his family, plus Mark Stoleson, chief executive of Legatum, became naturalised citizens of Malta in 2016, around the time of the referendum. A weird move for someone lobbying for Britain to exit the EU, but it does put him in a prime position to benefit once the worryingly portable multinationals keeping Britain’s economy afloat start moving to EU cities like Frankfurt.
Second, a Channel 4/Times sting caught three Tory ex-ministers attempting to sell information on the Brexit negotiation process to a fictional Chinese company. Andrew Lansley, who is most notorious for tanking NHS England’s finances and then taking on a job advising private companies on healthcare investments in the UK, advised them to pay him through his wife’s company so that it wouldn’t show up on the transparency register. Andrew Mitchell, who in 2010 was accused of pressuring the Ghanaian government to lift a ban on a company accused of smuggling after said company donated £40,000 to him, said that ‘my constituents don’t mind what I’m paid’. Peter Lilley, an outspoken climate-change sceptic with £400,000 in petrochemical shares, pointed out to the disguised journalists that he sat on two Brexit advisory committees, which would make him particularly good at giving them advance notice of new plans and negotiating positions.
Regarding Rees-Mogg and Brexit, what I’ve found is intriguing. A year before the referendum, his business partner Dominic Johnson, chief executive of Somerset Capital management, did a column in the Telegraph about how Brexit would be advantageous for SCM and similar companies. He complains at length about the burden of EU regulations, particularly for ‘boutique’ firms like SCM who have a small, elite group of customers. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point what SCM specialises in. Their thing is ‘emerging markets’, rapidly-developing third-world countries who would be able to make far more advantageous trade deals with Britain once it’s no longer part of an immensely powerful collective-bargaining alliance (I do think that the parallels between the right-wingers’ vision of Brexit and the more conventional kind of union-busting go unremarked-upon too often). See also James Dyson, a prominent Brexiteer, whose company mainly operates from Singapore and Malaysia. In particular, Rees-Mogg’s infamous ‘good enough for India’ comment probably didn’t come out of nowhere. Somerset Capital Management’s first single-country emerging market portfolio, established in 2015, was for India – normally, EM portfolios cover multiple countries to spread out the risk, because developing countries can sometimes develop in very untoward ways, but Dominic Johnson said that “the direction of travel in India is very attractive, we like the liquidity in the market, and it has lots of depth. It has been a very important region for our investors.” Very important indeed, apparently.
One interesting little wrinkle, though, is that Brexit may actually prove quite damaging for asset-management firms like SCM. Basically, the problem is because of a concept called ‘delegation’. You put your funds in one country, ideally a tax haven like Switzerland or Luxembourg, and have someone from another country with a delegation deal run it. It means you’ve got a much more diverse and competitive range of asset managers to pick from. Of course, delegation is an expression of trust that your ludicrously wealthy elite will have their money safely taken care of, so the fact that Britain is seeking regulatory divergence from the EU is encouraging European lawmakers to suspend our delegation rights (and let asset managers in their own countries take up the slack, conveniently enough). In other words, SCM and companies like it are about to get shut off from a whole bunch of customers in EU tax havens. The best solution for them is to make UK tax havens even more attractive, and Chancellor Philip Hammond has already threatened to do this. That would probably invite an EU blacklist, though, so JRM and company might be in trouble. Probably worth looking at to see if they make any noises related to this.