No evidence Farage knew of Gill’s crimespublished at 10:42 GMT
10:42 GMT
Joe Pike
Political & Investigations Correspondent
Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption,
Gill and Farage campaigning for the Brexit Party in 2019
Nigel Farage and Nathan Gill may
have been close colleagues at the European Parliament, but police say there is
no evidence that the Reform leader was aware of his friend’s criminality.
Farage has previously said he was
“stunned” by the revelations. “I didn’t know anything about it,
all I knew was that he’d been to Ukraine”, he said earlier this month.
However the Nathan Gill bribery
saga – with its links to Russia – is awkward for a leader and party whose
critics have claimed are soft on Vladimir Putin.
Farage has been dogged by
accusations of sympathy for Putin since saying in 2014 that
he “admired” the Russian president “as an operator”.
He has also been criticised for
appearances on the state-controlled RT (Russia Today) television network.
In 2022, Farage tweeted, external that Russia’s
full-scale invasion of Ukraine was “a consequence of EU and Nato expansion”, which is Putin’s longstanding position.