First witness statement of: C Cadwalladr

Filed on behalf of: Defendant

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE Claim no. QB-2019-

ARRON BANKS

Claimant

- and -

CAROLE CADWALLADR

Defendant

FIRST WITNESS STATEMENT OF CAROLE CADWALLADR

I, CAROLE CADWALLADR, C/O RPC, Tower Bridge House, St Katharine's Way, London E1W
1AA WILL SAY AS FOLLOWS:

A. Introduction

1. I am a freelance journalist and writer. The primary outlet for my work is Guardian News &
Media with whom I’ve had a writing contract for the last 16 years, predominantly contributing
interviews, features and comment pieces to the Observer newspaper. In effect I worked full-
time for the newspaper during this period.

2. I am the Defendant in these proceedings and this witness statement is made in support of
my defence to the claim. The contents of this statement are within my own knowledge,
unless otherwise stated, and are true. To the extent that the contents of this statement are
not directly within my own knowledge, the contents are true to the best of my knowledge,
information and belief and are based on the sources indicated.

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B. My initial investigations and reporting on issues relating to the EU referendum campaign:
2016

3. By 2016, I had been writing about the impact of technology on society for more than a
decade. In the early 2000s, I had been excited by the potential benefits of technology but I
had gradually become increasingly aware of its negative and harmful impacts and had
written a number of articles about these issues.

4. On November 6, 2016, I wrote a comment article on fake news for the Observer based on
my observations of what was happening in the US ahead of the presidential election.

5. After Donald Trump won the US election, the editor of the Observer asked me to follow up on
the story I had written about fake news and do a much bigger piece for the Review section
[RPC0002356]. This became my first major piece on fake news, disinformation, the power of
the social media platforms and was the starting point of what is now a five-year-long
investigation. That article explored, in particular, how Google’s algorithm appeared to have
been attacked or ‘gamed’ and was surfacing right-wing hate material. I found that an
American academic, Jonathan Albright, had just undertaken the first detailed research into
what he described as a “fake news ecosystem”. It appeared that a systemised attack on the
internet had occurred and “fake news” had flooded the social media platforms.

6. Jonathan told me about a company called Cambridge Analytica (“CA”) that had worked for
the Trump and Brexit campaigns and how it could exploit and “microtarget” individual voters.
It was the first time I’d heard of CA. In the article I stated that CA worked for “Vote Leave”. I
later found out that it was actually the unofficial “Leave.EU” campaign that had claimed to
work with CA and not the officially designated “Vote Leave” campaign. The Vote Leave
campaign was the official campaign led by Boris Johnson. The Leave.EU campaign was led
by Nigel Farage. It was this campaign which the Claimant funded but I did not know this until
later.

7. The article caused a huge stir in the UK and the US. People were horrified especially that
holocaust denial was being promoted by Google. I continued to investigate and report on
this subject.

8. On December 18 2016, I wrote a comment piece in the Observer that again referenced CA
[RPC0002191]. This led to a back and forth of letters in which CA denied working for the
Leave campaign. Following those letters from CA, the readers’ editor of the Observer wrote
to Mr Andy Wigmore, a spokesman for the Leave.EU campaign and a close associate of the
Claimant, to ask him if they had hired CA [RPC0000338].

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9. On January 27, 2017, Mr Wigmore wrote to the Observer and stated that he had met with CA
and worked with them but that Leave.EU had not paid them. Mr Wigmore said, “They happily
helped.” This email was forwarded to me and I was extremely curious to know exactly what
he meant by this.

C. My meeting with Andy Wigmore: February 2017

10. In early February, 2017, I was preparing another story about technology and politics
[RPC0000761]. I had been investigating CA and how it apparently scraped data from millions
of people’s Facebook profiles. It seemed to be a peculiar company. It was based in London
and as well as working in elections it had a long history as a military and defence contractor.
I spoke to a number of experts who knew about the company including Michal Kosinski, an
academic at Stanford who had raised warnings about CA’s use of Facebook data, and Paul-
Olivier Dehaye, a professor of mathematics at Geneva University and a data activist who had
been investigating CA for many months [RPC0000370, RPC0000383]. He is an expert in the
use of personal data in politics.

11. I had found out more information about the alleged owner of CA, a reclusive US hedge fund
owner, Robert Mercer, and his right-hand man, a political operative called Stephen Bannon
who was at that time chief strategist to Donald Trump and a vice president of CA.

12. I was trying to understand more about this “fake news ecosystem” and interviewed experts in
“computerised propaganda” at the University of Oxford who described their research into
“information operations” in the US election. They described a situation in which Russia had
pioneered “hybrid warfare” techniques in its conflict in the Ukraine - where they used
propaganda online in tandem with military operations on the ground - which had
subsequently been copied and brought to the West. They showed me how some of the
complex machinery behind the fake news system in the US election and how it had operated
but said it was a mystery how it had been organised and who had run and paid for it. They
described what had happened in 2016 as a “perfect storm” and made a connection between
Trump’s election and the EU referendum.

13. On February 14, 2017, I emailed Mr Wigmore and asked to meet. I was in the late stages of
preparing the above article when I met Mr Wigmore on February 20, 2017. I was expecting
to meet him briefly but ended up speaking to him for several hours. During the meeting, Mr
Wigmore described how data, artificial intelligence (“AI”) and Facebook had been crucial
assets in the Leave campaign. He explained in detail how personal data was the critical
difference that allowed the Leave campaign to target individuals in order to message them.
At the time of the meeting, I knew almost nothing about Mr Wigmore and the Claimant. I am

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 not sure I had ever even heard of either of them before and I had only done the most cursory
Google search of Mr Wigmore prior to the meeting and there was not that much information
about him on the internet. I knew that the Claimant was a businessman who had funded the
Leave campaign and that Mr Wigmore was his close associate who handled PR on his
behalf.

14. Mr Wigmore also made several comments that struck me as odd. He told me, for example,
that he carried three phones for security purposes. He also talked about his role as a
diplomat for Belize. I hadn’t known about this before the interview and was confused about
why a diplomat with a foreign government was leading a British political campaign. He also
told me that he, the Claimant and Mr Farage were due to travel to the US where Mr Farage
would make a talk to the Conservative Political Action Conference (or CPAC).

15. He said I should expect a surprise because he said “Nigel” [Farage] was going to make a
very different type of speech than usual. When I asked him in what way, he said it was going
to be about the importance of Ukraine and Russia in dealing with Syria. When I queried why
this was, he said Mr Farage had long been interested in Russia and Ukraine because of his
work in the European Parliament.

16. Regarding the work that CA did for the Leave.EU campaign, he said CA had been happy to
help because the Trump and Brexit campaigns were the same family. He talked freely and
openly about CA and a US election consultant Gerry Gunster of the firm Goddard Gunster
(“GG”), a specialist in referendums.

D. My investigations into and reporting on the Claimant and related issues: February to
March 2017

17. As soon as I left the meeting, I googled Mr Wigmore to find out more about him and one of
the first results I found was a Spectator article which was based on a tweet that Mr Wigmore
had put out. The tweet had included a photograph of a car belonging to the Claimant’s wife
which had the number plate “X MI5 SPY”. The article was headlined: “X MI5 SPY: Do Mr
and Mrs Banks have something to tell us?” It reported that the Claimant’s wife was a Russian
woman called Ekaterina Paderina (also referred to as Katya Banks) who had been involved
in what it called “a Russian spy scandal”.

18. My meeting with Mr Wigmore was just a few weeks after the first major allegations were
made public that Donald Trump had been targeted and compromised by the Russian
government.

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19. It seemed a slightly bizarre coincidence that the leaders of the Brexit campaign who were
close to the Trump team also had somewhat colourful Russian connections.

20. I was on a very tight deadline and had written most of the technology and politics piece but I
discovered that British political parties declared their spending and that you could search
their returns on the Electoral Commission’s website. I spent a long time searching its
database but I could not find any record of any spending by Leave.EU on CA or GG or any
registered donations from them. I was unfamiliar with the database, however, so I rang the
Electoral Commission’s press office to ask them to help me find it. They helped me establish
that although Mr Wigmore had said both CA and GG had helped Leave.EU, nothing had
been declared in relation to use of their services.

21. I established that a “gift of services” by a company has to be declared to the Electoral
Commission and the maximum amount is strictly limited by law. I also discovered that
donations from foreign companies or individuals are strictly forbidden or ‘impermissible’.

22. According to the reporting rules explained to me by the press officer, Leave.EU had
potentially broken several UK electoral laws if it had failed to declare a “gift of services” from
CA. This apparent gift was also from an undisclosed foreign and therefore impermissible
donor, as CA’s ultimate owner was the American billionaire Robert Mercer.

23. I also described to Prof. Dehaye what Mr Wigmore had told me about Leave.EU’s use of
data and he said it raised many red flags. Mr Wigmore had told me that they had gathered
data from many different sources and that this data had helped it campaign for Brexit. He
also said there had been commercial crossovers for their insurance business as a result of
the work they had done for Leave.EU [RPC0000352]. I did not understand the details but I
thought it raised further questions.

24. I interviewed a number of authorities on electoral and data law who said this seemed to raise
serious questions regarding the use of data in politics including the referendum: on potential
breaches of UK electoral law, UK data laws. It raised other questions about Donald Trump’s
campaign in the US as CA had apparently worked on both elections.

25. On February 26, 2017, I wrote an article headlined “Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire
waging war on mainstream media” [RPC0000872, RPC0001751] and an accompanying
news article. I was particularly concerned about the possible misuse of Facebook data by CA
and the possible involvement of a US billionaire in a British referendum of enormous
consequence. I thought the question of how Leave.EU’s campaigning had been funded,

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 whether that funding was legitimate and how Leave.EU had used data to target people and
whether that was legal were questions of the greatest public interest.

26. A week later, the Observer ran a front page story that the Information Commissioner’s Office
(“ICO”) was going to launch an inquiry into the use of data in politics.

27. Following publication the Claimant repeated on Twitter that CA had worked for Leave.EU. On
February 26, 2017, he tweeted at a journalist: “Quite so Jim, our engagement with
Cambridge was before spending limits and we have correctly filed the restricted amount in
the short period.” On March 3, 2017, a Times journalist Hugo Rifkind, tweeted at him: “Hi
@Arron_banks. I tweeted you earlier to ask whether Leave.EU did or didn’t work with
Cambridge Analytica. You seem to have missed it?”. The Claimant replied: “Hi @hugorifkind
we have made no secret of working with Cambridge. We created a huge SM [social media]
machine that took the message to voters.”

28. The ICO inquiry into the use of data in UK politics and an investigation into specifically what
happened in the referendum subsequently became an extensive and far-ranging
investigation that has levied fines on multiple organisations and campaigns, including
Leave.EU and Eldon Insurance. I understand that its investigation into the use of data by
Leave.EU, the UK Independence Party (“UKIP”) and Eldon Insurance (the Claimant’s
company) is still ongoing.

29. I also dug more into the Claimant’s business interests. I discovered that he owned at least 19
different companies but that his name is spelled in multiple different ways in the Companies
House register, as detailed in an article in the Observer in 2015. That article also said that
the Claimant's Leave campaign had originally been set up in Gibraltar by “a tax-avoidance
firm”, STM Fidecs. Another story revealed that the Claimant was named in the Panama
Papers, a leak of documents containing information about over 200,000 offshore entities, and
that he operated a complicated network of offshore companies.

30. In the US, more and more questions were being asked about the Trump campaign’s
relationship with the Kremlin. Days before I met Mr Wigmore, General Michael Flynn had
resigned from his position in the US as National Security Advisor because he’d failed to
declare a meeting with the Russian ambassador. I learned that he had been a consultant for
CA.

31. I also became aware of the first article of Open Democracy, an online media platform, on
“The ‘dark money’ that paid for Brexit”. This was the first in a series by Adam Ramsay, Peter
Geohegan and others that investigated many of the same individuals and structural issues as

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 my own work covered. Over the next two years, this independent news site would devote a
lot of time and resource to covering these same issues including the source of the Claimant’s
donation to the Leave.EU campaign.

32. I had also noticed the Claimant’s pro-Russia and pro-Putin statements on Twitter. He had
often tweeted about Putin being a “strong leader”, that Crimea – illegally occupied by Russia
– was to Russia as the Isle of Wight was to Britain, and that Russia’s actions in Syria showed
leadership.

33. In addition, I read into the background on the Claimant’s wife, Katya [RPC0001846]. Several
years previously, a ‘spy scandal’ had made major headlines in Britain. It involved a young
Russian woman called Ekaterina Zatuliveter.

34. Ms Zatuliveter had appeared in proceedings before the Special Immigration Appeal
Commission (“SIAC”) in 2011. The court had heard that the UK Intelligence Services had
assessed that Ms Zatuliveter was working for Russian intelligence and had targeted the
Portsmouth South MP named Mike Hancock. The Home Office intended to deport her.
During Ms Zatuliveter’s hearing, it was revealed that MI5 officers had warned Mr Hancock
that he was a target for “honeytraps” involving young women Russian and Eastern European
spies who posed as sexually interested in him to gather information. It was reported that MI5
intelligence officers believed that Mr Hancock was a target because of the large naval base
in Portsmouth and his role on two parliamentary committees, the Defence Select Committee
and one on Russia.

35. The trial garnered a lot of press attention. In the middle of it a newspaper published details of
a “second spy scandal”. It alleged Mr Hancock had had an affair with another Russian
woman, Katya Paderina. She had approached him, it was reported, because she needed
help with her visa. At the time, it was reported that she was now married to a Bristol-based
businessman. This businessman had subsequently become better known as the funder of
the Leave.EU campaign: ie the Claimant.

36. The fact that the Claimant’s wife may have been used by Russian intelligence seemed
immediately important to me. It was striking to me that there were tangential links between
Russia and the Claimant through his wife, given my general concern about Russia’s attempt
to interfere with the democratic process in foreign countries. I thought at this stage that if the
Claimant’s wife had potential Russian connections, and the Claimant was a financier of
Leave.EU, he could potentially have been on the radar for Russia to potentially groom as
part of their campaign of foreign influence. I learned that the Kremlin would often extend its
influence through the wives or girlfriends of Russian oligarchs based overseas. I did not think

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 then (and still have never thought) that the Claimant was a Russian spy or similar, however, I
did believe it was important to investigate further.

37. During my research, I also learned that the MP Ben Bradshaw had raised questions about
Russian interference in UK politics in Parliament. I contacted him and he introduced me to a
few people including Neil Barnett. I discovered Mr Barnett was an old acquaintance who I
had met through friends many years earlier in Lebanon. He had served in the army and had
subsequently set up a private intelligence firm, Istok, as well as writing journalistic reports. I
knew Mr Barnett had a credible background and, when I spoke to him on the phone and
discovered he had good contacts with MI5 and MI6 officers who he said were very
concerned about Russia’s influence in the UK, I took his allegations seriously.

38. Mr Barnett was particularly interested in the question of Russian money and influence in UK
politics and specifically thought there were questions about Mr Farage, the Claimant and the
funding of the EU referendum. He and two colleagues had researched the Claimant’s
financial filings and said they couldn’t see any visible source for the money that he had
donated to Leave.EU. They said that the public records showed he did not have as much
money as he had claimed to have. They said it did not add up. Mr Barnett pointed to a
pattern across Europe by which businessmen had been groomed and targeted by Russian
intelligence. He said there was a pattern where businessmen were rewarded with lucrative
business deals and this money later found its way into politics. He said that his intelligence
services contacts thought the Claimant was a “useful idiot” – a Russian term for someone
who is unwittingly used to achieve a foreign policy objective.

39. In June 2016, before I was aware of any of these issues, Mr Barnett had written an early
piece about the mystery of the origins of the Claimant’s money in a US journal, the American
Interest, headlined “Who Funded Brexit?”. He pointed to the Claimant’s offshore links, the
weakness of Britain’s electoral and transparency laws and the “Americanization” of British
politics with the arrival of big money. He published a further article in November 2017 for a
non-partisan US think-tank in Washington DC called the Atlantic Council on Russian
influence and subversion across Europe entitled “The Kremlin’s Trojan Horses”
[RPC0001994]. When we spoke, Mr Barnett was concerned that Leave.EU could have
received funding from Russia, possibly through the Claimant’s offshore entities. He told me
that the Claimant owned diamond mines in Southern Africa and that he thought that the
Claimant could be laundering money into the UK via these diamond mines. He said that as
well as diamond mines, the Claimant also owned a jewellers’ shop in Bristol and he
explained that a well-known money laundering technique is to own the supply chain from
mine to shop. By controlling every element of the supply chain, it is relatively simple to

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 launder additional money or gemstones and that this could be a way to channel funds from
unknown sources such as Russia into UK bank accounts.

40. I also read the judgment of SIAC in the Katya Zatuliveter case. Ms Zatuliveter had won the
right to stay in the UK, but it was clear that the security services had assessed her to be an
intelligence asset of the Russian government. An article published in the Daily Mail after the
judgment included a quote from a prominent Russian defector, Oleg Gordievsky, who had
once run the KGB’s bureau in London. He described Ms Zatuliveter as “the best Russian spy
for 30 years”.

41. I also began reading more deeply about "hybrid warfare" and how Russia had learned how to
dominate the information space as a means of advancing its military goals. In the invasions
of Ukraine and Crimea, it had discovered vulnerabilities in the social media platforms that
could be exploited to advance a political agenda.

42. In early 2017, the first research and understanding were surfacing of how these techniques
had been exported to the West. This research also showed parallels between the US
presidential election in November 2016 and the EU referendum in June 2016. Some ‘trolls’
and ‘bots’ that had been used to advance pro-Trump propaganda had been found to have
previously been pro-Brexit accounts, for example.

43. The Electoral Commission launched an investigation into Leave.EU spending returns
subsequent to my February 26 2017 article about CA, Leave.EU and Robert Mercer.. But
there seemed to be many more unanswered questions. I was particularly concerned about
the possible breaches of electoral law and the abuse of data but there were other questions
that had not been properly investigated. These Ied: 1) The possible misuse of Facebook data
2) How that was potentially used in the US and UK. 3) The source of the Claimant’s wealth.
4) Leave.EU’s use of data and its relationship with Eldon insurance. 5) Leave.EU’s
relationship with Vote Leave and a company that seemed apparently connected to CA called
AggregateIQ that had worked with Vote Leave 6) The relationship between certain
individuals connected to the Leave campaign and Russia, including the Claimant.

E. My interview with the Claimant: March 2017

44. I had learned that the Claimant was the biggest donor to the Brexit campaign and the biggest
political donor in British history. He had multiple businesses connected via a complicated
offshore structure and I had spoken to multiple different experts who had raised questions
about his financial dealings and links to Russia.

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45. I was continuing to investigate CA but I also thought there were questions to answer about
the source of the Claimant’s donation to Leave.EU. I thought the fairest and most direct way
to attempt to answer these was to ask him. I therefore proposed a profile interview on the
Claimant to my editor at the Observer and asked Mr Wigmore to set it up.

46. The reason I then decided to ask him for an interview was to be able to put all the questions
to him directly. I was troubled by the possible illegality in referendum campaigning and
believed it was improper to trigger Article 50 before these had been investigated. I expressed
this view in an op-ed article of March 15, 2017.

47. On March 25, 2017, I interviewed the Claimant for a feature in the Observer, which was
subsequently published as: “Arron Banks: ‘Brexit was a war. We won. There’s no turning
back now’” [RPC0000001, RPC0000016, RPC0000002, RPC0000015, RPC0000019,
RPC0000020, RPC0002570].

48. To prepare for this interview, I read everything I could find on the Claimant. He had written a
memoir, “The Bad Boys of Brexit” [ABD000118]. This was a “diary” of the Leave campaign
ghost-written by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott and published under the Claimant's name in
October 2016. The book included an account of how the Claimant and Mr Wigmore had met
“the KGB's man in London” at the UKIP conference in September 2015. This was a man he
called “Oleg”. He said “Oleg” had subsequently invited them to lunch at the Russian
Embassy. The Claimant described a jolly, drunken affair that had ended with them drinking
“Stalin's brandy”.

49. On the day of the interview, the Claimant was at a MasterInvestor conference at the
Business Design Centre in Islington. The conference was organised by one of the Claimant's
business partners, Jim Mellon. The Claimant and Mr Mellon own a bank together in the Isle
of Man and Mr Mellon had been an early funder of the Leave.EU campaign.

50. I had already read into Mr Mellon’s background. He also had a background in and
connections to Russia. He had made his fortune in Russia after the collapse of communism
and it was reported that he still maintained close business links to the country. He is a tax
exile who is unable to vote in British politics. It is reported that he was the person who
introduced the Claimant to Nigel Farage.

51. After the conference, the Claimant and I went to a pub across the road from the Design
Centre where I interviewed him over several hours. I would describe it as quite a jolly
afternoon. I found the Claimant to be open and easy going with a good sense of humour. He
was happy to answer my questions and we spoke on a whole manner of subjects. I enjoyed

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 the conversation. I thought that the Leave.EU campaign was a genuinely impressive
achievement, and he made an easy interviewee in that he was happy to talk. I had the
impression that he enjoyed being the subject of attention from both the public and journalists.
He seemed to be enjoying the way that politics had brought him into the spotlight. It was just
a few days after Article 50 was triggered which began the formal process of taking the UK
out of the EU, and he was in what I would describe as a triumphalist mood. He talked about
his plans to launch a new political campaign and the prospect of a major feature profile in a
Sunday newspaper was a big deal for him, I think.

52. There were a number red flags that emerged during our discussion. The Claimant said a
number of things that struck me as odd. There were statements about activities that I
believed were potentially illegal. He admitted using Leave.EU data to target commercial
messages. I had actually found out about the MasterInvestor conference from an email sent
to me as a Leave.EU subscriber. Other messages from Leave.EU included advertisements
for Go Skippy, one of his insurance products. I had already spoken to data experts who said
that this looked to be a breach of UK data protection laws. It is a fundamental principle, under
UK data protection laws, that data should not be gathered for one purpose and then used for
another purpose without people’s express consent.

53. I put this to the Claimant. He reacted playfully but belligerently. He asserted that it was "his
data" and he could do what he liked with it. He was admitting that he was using personal
data gathered for political purposes to promote his insurance business but he had a “don’t
care” attitude. It seemed highly reckless that a man with a multi-million pound insurance
business who had access to hundreds of thousands of people’s personal data would say
such a thing. Data is a key part of the insurance business and the Claimant must have
known about data legislation but he appeared to simply not care about it.

54. He also volunteered that “We had no Russian money into Brexit”. I had not asked him if he
had. Rather, in relation to Russia, I had asked him about Donald Trump and his contacts with
Russia. I had also asked about his wife’s connection to Mike Hancock MP. I detailed this odd
discrepancy in the article. As I said in the article, I found it odd that he was the one who
raised this issue. I have a done a lot of interviewing and it is always hard to know when to
ask “the difficult question”. In this case, I did not need to. The Claimant did it for me.

55. There were a few other oddities from the meeting. The Claimant said that he had attended
two lunches with the Russian ambassador. In his own book, he only talked about one
meeting. I noted this discrepancy in this detail and in fact I asked the Claimant about it
several times over Twitter over the next year.

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56. The Claimant told me that he had threatened to sue CNN over reports into his Russian
connections. I had not known this until this meeting. The Claimant said it had upset him
because it had gone “too far”.

57. I later looked up this report. It was a very brief segment in which a pundit suggested that
there were politicians in Europe who had documented links to Russia and one of these was
the Claimant.

58. There seemed to be a discrepancy between the Claimant’s nonchalance at having potentially
broken electoral and data laws and his response to this allegation. He also was openly pro-
Russian and pro-Putin on social media. The CNN segment was a throwaway comment that
had not made much if any impact at all in the UK. The Claimant's reaction seemed oddly
defensive given his apparent recklessness and lack of concern over allegations of potentially
illegal behaviour, such as around his firms' handling of data. The CNN remark had not made
headlines and was not alleging criminal behaviour. A potential breach of customers’ data on
the other hand is a serious allegation with huge consequences for a company that depends
on handling and protecting customer data.

59. The Claimant told me that his wife had “the profile that would fit a Russian spy”. I had read
that Katya Banks spoke six languages and had been brought up in Ekaterinaberg, a closed
naval city that was known as a “hotbed of spies” but I still thought this was a very odd thing to
say.

60. When I asked the Claimant if he had known about his wife's history with the Portsmouth MP,
Mr Hancock, before the news came out during the Zatuliveter hearing, he did not answer the
question. He described to me how extraordinary it was to find his wife on the front page of a
national newspaper being described as a spy but he would not say if it was a new piece of
information to him.

61. I speak some Russian and I attempted to say a few words to him but he didn’t respond and
he refused to say if he knew any of the language. I thought this was odd because his wife
and children speak Russian and he picked me up when I used the Czech word for cheers
rather than the Russian one. He pointed out – correctly – that I really could not speak
Russian well.

62. He also defended Putin’s illegal invasion of Crimea. This has been condemned by
international bodies including the UN. He said that he was “pro Putin” in that “I’m pro Putin
being actually for his country. It’s not possible to run that entire country as a pure democracy.
It’s not possible.” He subsequently explained, “What you’re talking about is the degree to

12
 which the Russians actually – let’s say they influenced the Brexit vote. Say I’m pro-Putin.
Nigel said he’s not anti-Putin, if that’s the right word. But all we’ve said is that there are
elements of what Russians say that we don’t disagree with.”

63. I asked him questions about the source of his wealth because that was something which
those I had spoken to were concerned about. He said he was a UK taxpayer with UK
businesses. I asked him why he maintained a complex network of offshore companies and
seemed defensive about this and about the Guardian's revelation that his businesses were in
the Panama Papers. I said that I understood that people kept their money offshore in dark
jurisdictions so that they could maintain secrecy about the source of this wealth. He offered
no answer to this. He was also vague about how much he had actually spent on the Brexit
campaign. Given the questions already surfacing about the source of his wealth and the
source of his donation to Leave.EU, these answers seemed insufficient and unsatisfactory.

64. My impression was that, as a private businessman, he had used Britain’s offshore
infrastructure - all of which is entirely legal - to make his business affairs more complex to
avoid regulatory and other scrutiny. My impression was that he liked to keep his business
affairs to himself and he did not consider this anybody else’s business. I pointed out to him
that it was his decision to put this money into politics that was the problem and made it my
and other people’s business to ask these questions. He did not seem to accept this point.

65. I put Neil Barnett's suspicions about using his diamond business directly to him. I suggested
to him that owning the entire supply chain was a “well known money laundering” device. He
did not deny the charge. He said: “You have no evidence of” that".

66. The Claimant suggested I was looking for a smoking gun but “there’s a smoking gun on
every table”. He said that “nobody cared”. I took this to mean that he felt an impunity from the
law. He seemed to be saying that the issues I was raising around electoral and data laws did
not matter because it had been a landslide victory for Leave and these were inconsequential
details of no relevance.

F. Further investigations and publications in relation to the Claimant: March 2017 to March
2018

67. In order to better understand the context of the Claimant’s remarks about Russia and
understand more about Russian influence in politics, I rang a number of different experts.
Ben Bradshaw MP put me in touch with several people who had also expressed concern
about possible Russian interference in UK politics, including Anthony Glees at Buckingham
University, who is Director of the Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies. He had

13
 contacts with the security services and said he had serious concerns about the sources of
the Claimant's income. He said he was working with the Sunday Times on an investigation
into the Claimant’s business arrangements (which was never published). He also introduced
me to an academic at City University, Ronan Palen, who did some preliminary work on the
Claimant’s companies and their offshore structures. His opinion was that the structures were
opaque. He said this was a common structure that businessmen set up for different purposes
but generally the intention was the same: to make their income and sources of wealth
complex and make it difficult for investigators to track.

68. I also spoke to Ed Lucas, who is a noted Russia expert, security specialist and consultant
with close intelligence connections; and to Andrew Foxall, Director of the Henry Jackson
society (a non-party think tank which promotes democracy and human rights). The experts I
talked to flagged concerns about Russian interference in UK politics and considered the
opaque nature of the Claimant’s finances a worrying concern. They pointed out that Russia
had funded far-right parties across Europe and that Russia had a strategic interest in
weakening the EU. I also spoke to Ben Nimmo, an expert on Russia and disinformation at
the Atlantic Council, who pointed out that UKIP had MPs with Russian connections and that
Mr Farage had voted in favour of Russian interests in the European Parliament on many
occasions. He also said that he and others had discovered evidence of Russian influence
operations targeting elections across Europe including a general election in Germany and
the Scottish referendum.

69. A senior intelligence analyst also made me aware of a speech by Alex Younger, the head of
MI6, in December 2016. In that speech, he said the risks of online interference from hostile
foreign powers such as Russia were profound and should be of concern to all who share
democratic values.

70. Having spoken to Russian security experts, I understood the wider context of how Russia
was targeting European elections generally, and how its money and influence had spread
unchallenged through institutions in the UK. I found it troubling that the Claimant’s wealth
was not visible given the huge sums he had donated to the Leave campaign.

71. I spoke to Prof. Dehaye again about the use of data. He told me that he had reported
Leave.EU to the ICO because he thought this use of political data for commercial purposes
and possibly vice versa was illegal. After I had conducted the interview with the Claimant but
before it was published, I also attended a symposium of academics and regulators led by Dr
Martin Moore, the director of the Centre for Study of Media, Communication and Power at
King’s College London, and Dr Damian Tambini, a senior lecturer at the LSE. They are

14
 leading authorities on electoral law and political campaigning in the UK and they had
convened the symposium because of their fears about the inadequacy of British electoral
laws and the danger this posed to our democracy. They flagged how new technology
platforms had made it simple for foreign money to enter the country's electoral process. They
had researched how online campaigning had transformed political campaigning in a few
short years but our electoral and data laws had not caught up. They cited the referendum as
an example of how political campaigns could easily break legal spending limits and spend
millions of extra pounds that no-one would ever know about. And they flagged specific
questions about the referendum, including the offshore nature of the Claimant’s business
arrangements. They thought that Britain’s entire regulatory structure in these areas was not
fit for purpose and needed a radical overhaul and they had invited experts from other bodies
to talk about what fixes were required.

72. On April 1, 2017, I published an article in the Observer on the problem with dark money in
elections [RPC0002572]. This article includes a quote from the Claimant saying “we were
just cleverer than the regulators and the politicians” in relation to the Brexit victory.

73. A day later, on April 2, 2017, my interview with the Claimant was published. Mr Wigmore
texted me to say how much they had enjoyed reading it.

74. In the US, the role of Julian Assange and Wikileaks was becoming a central focus of the
investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian
government. A New York Times report had revealed that emails from the Democrats’
campaign and Hillary Clinton that Wikileaks had obtained and had leaked to explosive effect
before the US election had been hacked by Russian intelligence operatives.

75. A confidential source in the US suggested I look closely at Nigel Farage and the timing of a
visit he made to Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in March. The meeting had been
reported in passing but not that the visit coincided with another major leak hours later. This
new leak – Vault 5 – was extremely damaging to the CIA. This research led me to writing an
article on April 23 about this visit, “When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange”, and researching
more about Mr Farage. I discovered that he had broadly pro-Russian views, voting on pro-
Russian lines in the EU Parliament, naming Putin as his political hero and being paid to
appear on the Russian state-funded Russia Today (“RT”) television channel. My colleagues
at the Guardian subsequently published a story in June that said Mr Farage was a “person of
interest” to FBI investigators into possible Trump-Russia collusion. I considered that all of this
directly related to the Claimant because he had funded Mr Farage’s Brexit campaign.

15
76. Around this time, I found a confidential source who had worked for UKIP for many years. The
source told me that UKIP had been targeted by Russian individuals with close ties to the
Russian state. He told me that this was a familiar strategy across Europe by which Russian
operatives targeted minor political parties that were easy to take over. This source suggested
that Russian money had been used to fund the Brexit campaign. He claimed to have been
interviewed by FBI investigators.

77. On April 21, 2017 the Electoral Commission formally announced an investigation into
Leave.EU’s spending returns and whether or not there had been any impermissible
donations.

78. On May 4, 2017, I wrote the next major article in the series [RPC0000873]. I had found
confidential sources who had revealed much more information about CA. This article also
contained a lot of information about Mr Farage’s connections to the Trump campaign and its
links to Russia. A week later, we published a further article that focussed on the launch event
for Leave.EU on November 18, 2015 and further links between Leave.EU, CA and another
CA-linked tech firm in Canada, AggreqateIQ, that had worked for Vote Leave These two
Brexit campaigns were apparently separate but the document raised the question of whether
they were [RPC0002182].

79. Immediately following this article, Leave.EU and CA both issued statements denying having
worked with each other. The impression was that now that an investigation had been opened
and serious questions were being asked about its legality, the individuals involved had
changed their stories.

80. In May 2017, the US Department of Justice appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to
investigate ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

81. On June 30, 2017, the Financial Times (“FT”) published a major analysis into the funding of
the Brexit campaign, the conclusion of which was that it could not verify the source of the
Claimant's wealth [RPC0002571]. It also found discrepancies in Leave.EU’s finances.

82. The FT’s investigation was carried out by a business investigative reporter called Cynthia
O’Murchu. I met Ms O’Murchu a couple of times in 2017 and 2018. Her view was that the
Claimant’s finances simply did not stack up and that he did not have anywhere near the
amount of money he purported to have. She was frustrated that she had not had more time
to spend on the story because there were so many unanswered questions.

16
83. A Newsnight report on the Claimant from the time also reported that he had a £250,000
mortgage on his house. It seemed odd given that he was a self-reported multi-millionaire.

84. On July 30, 2017, the Sunday Times reported that the Claimant was expected to give
evidence to a congressional Committee investigating Russian interference [RPC0002569].

85. At some point during this summer I had a conversation with a Conservative MP Richard
Benyon who had also been on the Intelligence and Security Committee and he signalled
concern about Russian money in British politics. He said that Russian espionage operations
in London far outstripped what there had been at the height of the Cold War.

86. I asked Mr Wigmore about his contact with authorities in the US investigating Russia. He told
me that he was in contact with a Congressional Committee and had given them a copy of a
pre-action letter the Claimant had sent the Atlantic Council after it published “The Kremlin’s
Trojan Horses”. On August 13, 2017, he sent this letter to me. It detailed what it claimed to
be defamatory allegations made in the Atlantic Council’s report including that it was untrue to
say the Claimant was a Russian asset or had received Russian funding. The Atlantic Council
report had not apparently claimed this. I was puzzled by seemingly minor points about this
letter which were that Mr Barnett claimed that not only had the report had never made such
an allegation (there was a minor reference to the Claimant being a funder of Leave.EU) but
that the Atlantic Council had never received the letter mentioned by Mr Wigmore. The letter
had been widely reported on – for example, in the Guardian because the Claimant issued a
press release about it – but I contacted the Atlantic Council and its general counsel
confirmed that he had never received this letter. Nevertheless it would seem that the Atlantic
Council removed a brief mention of the Claimant as a funder of Leave.EU at the request, I
understand, of Mr Barnett.

87. In September, 2017, I went for lunch with Mr Wigmore. This was a friendly informal
encounter in which I was able to ask him further direct questions on a number of matters. He
confirmed that he had spoken to members of a US Judiciary Committee investigating
Russian interference (he did not specify whether it was the Senate or House) about the
allegations made by the Atlantic Council. He said that the Leave.EU campaign had
developed AI tools and that much of this work had been done by actuaries working for Eldon
Insurance. He told me that Katya Banks's mother had studied languages “at Oxford”. He said
that she spoke seven languages and that it was always assumed that Russian linguists were
spies. When I asked whether she was, he said she would be “a shit spy”. He then said that
they had discovered that an investigator for a private intelligence firm, paid for by “American
interests”, had been investigating the Claimant. He said that they – ie he and the Claimant -

17
 owned their own private intelligence firm and they put “countersurveillance” on this
investigator. He then said that, because they believed this investigator was tapping the
Claimant's phone, they tapped his phone. He said that they had discovered by doing so that
he had been in touch with a Sunday Times journalist. I said that I did not know it was
possible to do such a thing and he said that everything was possible.

88. The understanding I took from this conversation was that the Claimant and Mr Wigmore
were, by their own admission, conducting what sounded like illegal surveillance on
investigators looking into their business and political dealings. I also took from this that they
apparently operated with an enormous sense of impunity. They were not only apparently
conducting illegal surveillance, but they were also telling me, a journalist, that they did so.
One of the many companies they owned was a private intelligence firm that worked with
someone the Claimant described in his memoir as “a South African spook”. I worried that I
had been or would be subject, also, to such surveillance.

89. Mr Wigmore had also told me that he and the Clamant had close relationships with the
police. He said that insurance companies had to work closely with the police on fraud-related
issues. It made me wonder if this sense of impunity was related to these close relations: they
did not apparently feel any sense of fear around engaging in potential illegal activity. They
were either reckless in the extreme or had reason to believe that laws did not apply to them. I
did not know the answer to this but it was something that was a recurring thought in my
dealings with them.

90. In October, Open Democracy published a number of articles about how the Claimant funded
Brexit and the source of his money. These were written by two financial journalists, Alistair
Sloan and Iain Campbell, who had been researching this subject for some time. One of the
articles was headlined “How did Arron Banks Afford Brexit?” and raised many issues around
the Claimant’s business affairs including questions about his diamond mines in Africa and his
relationship with individuals with dubious or criminal track records [RPC0002198]. It noted
that, in 2013, he was in serious financial difficulties. And that by 2014, those difficulties
“seemed to have evaporated”. It said that he then begun buying diamond mines, investing
millions into chemical companies and then funding UKIP.

91. The article referenced “cracks in Banks’ biography”. Companies he said he had worked for
which had no record of him, for example. It had also uncovered new details about his wife
who had kept possession of a council flat in Portsmouth overlooking the naval base. At the
heart of the story was a question of how much the Claimant had made from the sale of his

18
 insurance company Brightside. He had told the FT that he was worth £100 million but had
apparently only made £22 million from the sales of shares.

92. The article was a detailed unpicking of the Claimant’s finances that led to many questions.
The reporting of these matters made me yet more concerned about the Claimant’s honesty,
and whether he may be dishonest about other matters.

93. Following that publication, the MP Ben Bradshaw called for an investigation into dark money
and Russian influence in Parliament and this was reported in the newspapers.

94. On October 30, 2017, the first indictments in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian
interference in the 2016 US Presidential election campaign were unsealed. The first
indictment was regarding charges brought against a Trump aide called George
Papadopoulos who had tried to arrange a meeting between the Trump campaign and Putin
[RPC0002723]. When I read the indictment I was taken aback by the level of detail about
individuals based in London who were implicated in the investigation, the role of London itself
as a “neutral city” for key meetings and in particular the role of the Russian ambassador to
London, who was not named but I knew to be Ambassador Yakovenko, who appeared to be
a key communication channel between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

95. I already knew about the ambassador because of his lunch with the Claimant and because
he was on Twitter, as was the Russian Embassy. During 2017, the Russian Embassy Twitter
feed became semi-famous for making provocative and often belligerent remarks. The
Claimant and Leave.EU frequently retweeted both these accounts. In addition, at some point
in 2017, the Russian Embassy Twitter account started trolling me for my reporting into
Russian interference. I was one of a small number of journalists and MPs to whom it did this.

96. On November 1, 2017, the Electoral Commission announced it would be investigating the
source of the Claimant’s donations to Leave.EU. It said it would investigate donations worth
£2.3m, assessing whether the Claimant was the “true source” of loans made in his name,
whether the funding vehicle “Better for the Country Limited” - of which the Claimant was the
director and major shareholder - was the “true source” of donations made to Brexit
campaigners; or whether it was “acting as an agent” for some other source of funds. The
Claimant tweeted, “Gosh, I’m terrified” which made me believe he was not taking the
investigation seriously.

97. The Claimant responded with a statement on the same day which said: “The Guardian
allegations of Brexit being funded by the Russians and propagated by Ben Bradshaw” were
“complete bollocks”. He added: “My sole involvement with the ‘Russians’ was a boozy six-

19
 hour lunch with the ambassador where we drank the place dry (they have some cracking
vodka and brandy) and then wrote the account of the lunch in my book, “The Bad Boys of
Brexit’. Hardly top-secret stuff!” To be clear, “the Guardian” - by which I believed he meant
me - had never made this allegation.

98. The Claimant also rang me out of the blue. We spoke about various issues. He said he now
wanted a judge-led inquiry into Russian interference in UK democracy. He repeatedly said it
was “his” money and there was no mystery to it. I asked him when was the last time he had
seen the Russian ambassador. He said he had not seen him since he had had lunch with
him. I asked him if he'd met any other officials from the Russian Embassy. He said no.

99. On November 4, 2017, I wrote two articles for the Observer about the British connections to
the Trump-Russia investigation. The first was about Boris Johnson and Professor Mifsud, an
individual named in the recently unsealed FBI indictment as being close to Russian
intelligence. I wrote this in conjunction with Peter Jukes of Byline Media.

100. The second, which was several thousand words long, was headlined “Brexit, the ministers,
the professor and the spy: how Russia pulls the strings in Britain” [RPC0000766]. It was a
context piece that examined British connections to the Trump-Russia investigation. It
explained the role of Ambassador Yakovenko in the new indictments in the US and a broader
background of Russian interference in British politics. This included a parliamentary group,
the Conservative Friends of Russia in 2012, of which the CEO of Vote Leave had been a
member, which had been alleged to be a Russian “influence operation”. The Russian state-
owned broadcaster reported that a Russian diplomat, Sergey Nalobin, who had been close to
the group was subsequently expelled from the country. I included a very small amount of
detail about the Claimant’s involvement with Ambassador Yakovenko, “his vocal support of
Putin” and how he had been “open about his Russian contacts”.

101. On November 9, 2017, the Guardian published a story about Brexiteers who kept their
money offshore. It included the Claimant and Jim Mellon and related how the two men, both
major donors to the Brexit campaign, had put their money into an offshore tax haven. The
evidence came from the Paradise Papers leak.

102. My impression was that my communications with the Claimant and Mr Wigmore changed in
tone in November 2017, and that they became more aggressive and hostile toward me in this
period.

103. On November 13, 2017, Theresa May made a major speech acknowledging for the first time
that Russia was seeking to attack UK democracy and she acknowledged, in particular, the

20
 exploitation of technology and the social media platforms that I had been investigating. She
accused Russia of meddling in elections and planting fake stories in the media to “weaponise
information” in order to sow discord in the west. She said it was “threatening the international
order on which we all depend”.

104. This was the first official acknowledgement by the British government of these issues and
made the front page of all newspapers.

105. The Russian Embassy Twitter account responded by trolling Theresa May for her speech on
Russia in a way that seemed threatening to me. It posted a photo of her drinking wine at the
banquet where she gave the speech and said, “Dear Theresa, we hope, one day you will try
Crimean #Massandra red wine.” [RPC0002453] Crimea is illegally occupied by Russia. The
tweet seemed to me to be creepy, bordering on sinister. Leave.EU’s Twitter account
retweeted it. I found the support of Leave.EU for Russian Embassy statements disturbing.
Leave.EU was a British political campaign that had played a critical role in a crucial British
referendum on a platform of restoring British sovereignty. Yet a year later, it was siding with a
hostile foreign government against the British government. What is more it was supporting
this sort of comment directed towards the British Prime Minister. This seemed profoundly
troubling to me.

106. There were also a number of articles in the Sunday Times and elsewhere about the Claimant
which reported suspicions about the source of his money and the possibility of Russian
interference.

107. My article about the Russian spy, Sergey Nalobin, led to the Russian Embassy issuing a
press release about the matter and put out a number of tweets that either mentioned me or
tagged me in them, and each time Leave.EU and/or the Claimant would retweet these.
Leave.EU also made up its own artwork that was supportive of the Russian ambassador’s
attacks on me. I was disturbed by the Russian government’s behaviour towards me. I was
being personally targeted by a hostile nation state on account of my journalism. My computer
had been hacked earlier in the year and the attackers had purported to be Russian (I do not
know if they actually were). It increased my anxiety around security issues and of being
targeted as a result of my reporting. Although I had been a journalist with the Guardian for
many years, I did not, as a contractor, have access to cybersecurity assistance, IT support or
help with source protection at that time. The Russian embassy wrote to the Observer editor
calling me a “bad journalist” and complaining about my reporting in relation to this article. I
replied and it wrote again demanding a retraction of the claim that Sergey Nalobin had been
expelled from Britain. Several months later, Ambassador Yakavenko personally wrote to the

21
 editor again asking for a correction. The readers’ editor spent a long time investigating the
matter and footnoted these exchanges at the end of the article.

108. On November 14, 2017, Leave.EU tweeted a video that showed an image of me
photoshopped into a scene from the film, Airplane. It called me “hysterical” - a misogynistic
term applied to women - and showed me being violently assaulted. The soundtrack was the
Russian national anthem. Leave.EU was spelled out in Cyrillic. The tweet attracted hundreds
of complaints to Twitter about inciting violence about journalists. I was initially confused by
the video. I was not sure if it was some sort of weird joke. But I became increasingly worried
and uneasy about it. Hundreds of members of the public thought that Leave.EU was making
a direct physical threat toward me. Twitter refused to take down the video. I became
increasingly concerned about it. The letters from the Russian embassy had unnerved me as
had the fact that Leave.EU was continuing to retweet their attacks on me. Eventually the
Observer took action and an editor wrote to Mr Wigmore and asked him to remove the tweet,
which he did 72 hours later. I wrote a comment piece for the Observer about how disturbing I
thought this was: the overt links between Leave.EU and Russia, the violence of the video,
the way Leave.EU was targeting both journalists and MPs and, in my view, was laundering
extremist political content into the mainstream British media.

109. In November 2017 the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Russia began examining the issue
of Russian interference in UK politics. This heard from experts on Russian interference and
“active measures” on the ways that Russia was weaponising information and trying to
undermine western democracy. I was invited to give evidence alongside other journalists and
experts.

110. In December 2017, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (“DCMS”) Select Committee began
what would become a long-running inquiry into fake news and disinformation. The
Committee had opened the inquiry in response to the increased understanding of how online
media was being weaponised and it was seeking to understand the issues I had been writing
about for the past year. I was invited to give evidence at a preparatory session alongside
experts and academics who all stressed the high public interest of these issues.

111. There was a small body of journalists who were extremely concerned by this potential
illegality and the ongoing vulnerability of our democracy. Throughout the winter of 2017, I
talked to Peter Geoghegan, Adam Ramsay and Mary Fitzgerald of Open Democracy, for
example, who had undertaken a series of articles on the issue of “dark money” in UK
elections. We were all frustrated by a lack of resources and that some of the bigger
organisations with the resources to take on a story like this were largely shying away from it.

22
 I knew, for example, that a BBC journalist, John Sweeney, had experienced difficulties
getting an investigation on the Claimant on screen at the BBC because of alleged political
sensitivities.

112. On March 3, 2018, a prohibited nerve agent was used to try and assassinate Sergei Skripal,
a former Russian spy, in Salisbury. It was later found to be responsible for killing a British
citizen, Dawn Sturgess. In response, the British government expelled 23 Russian spies.

113. On Twitter, the Claimant and Leave.EU continued to treat the Trump-Russia investigation as
a joke, even following the Skripal incident. They retweeted RT’s denials of Russian
involvement and repeated the Kremlin’s lines. On April 5, 2018, they tweeted a comic book-
style image of the incident with a speech bubble coming out of Theresa May’s mouth. The
accompanying text said that “Theresa claims the Salisbury nerve attack was 100% Russia is
becoming shakier than Boris Yeltsin after 10 vodkas.” I did not find the Skripal incident funny
or amusing. I thought it was grotesque that they were repeating Kremlin talking points about
the use of a prohibited chemical weapon and all available evidence concluded the Russian
government was responsible.

114. In March, 2018, I was contacted by the Claimant’s former business partner in South Africa,
Chris Kimber, who had owned diamond mines with the Claimant. Mr Kimber told me that he
had a dossier of evidence including emails and that he could show that the Claimant was
engaged in serious illegal activity in Africa, as well as Lesotho politics. He said that the
Claimant had negotiations with Russian businessmen about investing in the diamond mines.
This had included solicited investment from Russian state-owned firms. Some of these
allegations seemed to support research and reporting from other sources, particularly around
the viability or otherwise of the diamond mines. Mr Kimber said he was willing to go on the
record and speak publicly about all this. We arranged to meet in London but then he
cancelled. This information remained “on background” without the evidential documents to
support it. However, in August 2018, Channel 4 News broadcast many of these same
allegations and I later acquired Mr Kimber’s affidavit which set this out in more formal
language (as I discuss below). It was nonetheless compelling hearing it as first-hand
testimony from someone who was in position to have been very close to the Claimant and
his diamond mines. and it helped inform my overall understanding of the questions over the
source of his wealth and the possibility that he actively sought investment from firms owned
by the Russian state.

115. Also, in March 2018, I met with Marcus LeRoux of a new investigative journalism
organisation called Source Material. He and another journalist had undertaken an extensive

23
 investigation into the Claimant’s business dealings in southern Africa and his diamond mines.
He had interviewed an expert who claimed that it was “geologically impossible” that his
diamond mines produced diamonds of the value he claimed. This claim echoed others I had
heard previously. He also had more information about the Claimant’s involvement in Lesotho
politics. Some of this had previously been published and Mr Wigmore had posted information
about their involvement with a Lesotho election campaign on Twitter but there was much
more detail about how the Claimant had become involved, apparently as part of his business
dealings in that country.

116. Mr LeRoux and his colleague Leigh Baldwin had done a deep dive into the Claimant’s
financial affairs and uncovered multiple concerns about his business dealings and
associates. In particular, they singled out an individual who was a director at one of the
Claimant’s firms who had been arrested on money laundering charges. I was in the middle of
my CA investigation so referred him to an Observer colleague who published a small portion
of the material. The rest appeared a month later in two Open Democracy articles: “Arron
Banks and Brexit’s Offshore Secrets” and “Not Everyone Agrees with Arron Banks About the
Value of his Diamond Mines.”

117. On March 18, 2018 I was finally able to publish a series of stories on CA, the misuse of
Facebook data, connections with Russia, the US elections and the EU referendum, the role
of the technology platforms and the implications of all this for democracy. An ex-CA data
consultant, Chris Wylie, provided confidential information for the articles. These articles had
a global impact and triggered multiple investigations in a dozen or more countries and fines
against Facebook of $100m and $5bn in the US and £500,000 in the UK and others against
CA.

118. Other whistle blowers also came forward at that point with other information relating to
Leave.EU. This included Brittany Kaiser, an ex-CA employee, who produced documents that
showed that the Claimant had hired CA to undertake work on the referendum campaign,
contrary to what the Claimant and Mr Wigmore now claimed. She produced emails to
Parliament that documented this. Ms Kaiser also claimed employees from the Claimant’s
Eldon Insurance business worked on Leave.EU’s campaign and that they had unlawful
access to Eldon’s customer data.

G. Investigation of and reporting resulting from the cache of emails relating to the Claimant:
March to July 2018

119. In late March 2018 I was invited onto the Sunday morning Andrew Marr show to review the
news headlines. The producers had also invited Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who had

24
 ghost written The Bad Boys of Brexit. Ms Oakeshott also worked closely with Lord Ashcroft,
a Conservative party donor and friend of Mr Wigmore’s with many interests in Belize. When
Leave.EU went to the US she had accompanied them. Ahead of the broadcast, Peter Jukes
told me that he had heard via a third party that Ms Oakeshott had information about the
Claimant that she was potentially prepared to give me. She rang me before the programme
and told me she might be prepared to talk to me and that she would tell me more after the
programme.

120. Mr Jukes told me of a young researcher, who I will refer to as Researcher 1, who had worked
with Ms Oakeshott. Mr Jukes told me that Researcher 1 had documents about the Claimant
and Leave.EU but that they did not want to hand them over because they were still working
with Ms Oakeshott and was worried about losing their job.

121. Mr Jukes had also discovered, independently, the following: that a friend of Researcher 1 –
who I will call Friend 1 - was also in possession of the cache of documents. Researcher 1
had given them to Friend 1 for safekeeping. Friend 1 said that Researcher 1 had “freaked
out” in November when the FBI investigation had begun intensifying and become worried
that they had become involved in something very serious. Researcher 1 gave them to Friend
1 in case anything happened to them. Mr Jukes had asked Friend 1 if he could see the
documents. Friend 1 refused.

122. On April 14, 2018, I published a story in the Observer that revealed documentary evidence
about the work that CA had undertaken for the Leave campaign [RPC0002200]. I had
obtained a copy of the invoice that CA had issued for the first phase of work for £41,500 and
it was made out to UKIP. I subsequently found that the Claimant had donated £41,500 to
UKIP to cover the cost of this work. It offered apparent proof that both the Claimant and CA
had deliberately misled the public when they said no work had been done. I conducted full
right to replies, and included the Claimant’s response in the article as I did with all my
articles.

123. In June 2018, I gave evidence in the EU Parliament about the risk of technology to
democratic processes and saw Christopher Wylie. He told me he had been talking to
Researcher 1 and that Researcher 1 had information about the Claimant of the utmost
seriousness. He said that he had contacted the Senate Intelligence Committee and the
Damian Collins MP (the Chair of the DCMS Select Committee) about it. Chris Wylie said he
was urging Researcher 1 to come forward but if they would not he would give his own
statement about it to Parliament and the US Congress. He would not give me the details of
this new information but he said it was about Russia.

25
124. I relayed this to Mr Jukes and he went back to Friend 1 and reiterated the importance of
getting the material she had been given by Researcher 1 into the public domain. He told
Friend 1 he believed it to be of the highest public interest and that there was a danger that
Researcher 1 would be publicly identified if it came out via other channels. Friend 1 agreed
and handed over a file to him [RPC0001272].

125. I read these emails late on June 6, 2018 at Mr Jukes’s flat. The information was in the form
of a text file of a number of emails to and from Mr Wigmore’s email account. They showed
that there had been a series of invitations from and to Ambassador Yakovenko, many of
which were accepted. They also showed that the Claimant had been offered preferential
shares in an investment scheme to consolidate several Russian goldmines and the
privatisation of a state-owned Russian diamond company, Alrosa. They showed that he was
taking these offers seriously and had pursued these possible deals over many months.

126. One of the first things I said to Mr Jukes after reading them through was that there was no
evidence that the Claimant or Mr Wigmore had gone through with the deals or made any
money from them. I have always kept that fact front and centre of all my reporting.

127. What struck me next was the timing. I knew the date of the Leave.EU press launch off the
top of my head because it had played a significant role in my Cambridge Analytica reporting:
November 18, 2015. I saw immediately that the initial approaches had been made that same
week with the presentation of the deal the day before. From the rest of the correspondence, I
saw that the deals had been discussed while Leave.EU was in the middle of the referendum
campaign.

128. I did not think that the Claimant was “a Russian agent” or “a Russian actor”. But there was
already good reason to think that he was on the radar of Russian intelligence because of his
pro-Kremlin views and his Russian wife. My impression on reading through the
correspondence was that he appeared to have been deliberately and systematically targeted
and groomed by the Russian government. I knew from my research how Russian intelligence
operatives would target far-right politicians across Europe and offer funding and assistance.
On the surface, this appeared like a similar operation. This often takes the form of indirect
funding in which a businessman is offered a “sweetheart deal”, i.e. a preferential deal not
available to others, and that some portion of this profit would be funnelled to a political party.

129. What was undeniable was that the line about “one lunch” with the Russian ambassador was
not true. The question of whether it was one lunch, as the Claimant had written in his book
and Leave.EU had claimed on its November 2017 press release, or two lunches, as the
Claimant told me when we met had always nagged at me. I had repeatedly tried to ask the

26
 Claimant and Mr Wigmore this on Twitter and again in subsequent conversations. On seeing
the emails, I realised that in fact both these claims were untrue and I believed that the reality
of the relationship between them and the Russian Embassy had been deliberately
concealed. The contact was extensive and sustained.

130. It was obvious to both me and Mr Jukes that this was a matter of the highest public interest
and needed to be put into the public domain as soon as possible.

131. In The Bad Boys of Brexit, the Claimant’s memoir, he had claimed that he had been invited
to meet the Russian ambassador after meeting a man he called “Oleg” at the UKIP party
conference. The emails revealed it was a political secretary at the Embassy called Alexander
Udod who had issued the invitation.

132. Open-source searches revealed that Mr Udod had been expelled from Britain after the
Skripal affair. This apparently confirmed that the British government regarded him as a spy or
involved in espionage activities.

133. Researcher 1 told us the background on the provenance of the material. They told us that in
November 2017 a Conservative MP with contacts in the intelligence services who they
believed was Gavin Williamson, the then Secretary of State for Defence, had contacted
Richard Tice, a businessman who was one of the most prominent figures in the Leave.EU
campaign and who was still actively campaigning for Brexit. We were told that Mr Williamson
had warned Mr Tice to disassociate himself from the Claimant. This was shortly after the first
FBI indictments had been unsealed which showed that the Trump-Russia investigation had
started in London and after the Electoral Commission launched its investigation into the
source of the Claimant’s donation to Leave.EU. We were informed that Mr Williamson had
told Mr Tice that the Claimant was “up to his neck in it”. Mr Tice shared this information with
Ms Oakeshott. She had then instructed Researcher 1 to go back through the emails to which
they had had access in order to research and write The Bad Boys of Brexit and to see if
there was any information in them that backed this up. Researcher 1 had done so and this
was when they had discovered these emails. Researcher 1 had seen the documents in their
original form as emails and verified to us that the content was the same as the emails they
had viewed.

134. By June 8, 2018, we had established that to the best of our understanding the emails were
both authentic and lawfully obtained. The emails detailed numerous meetings with the
Russian Embassy and we were concerned that this could constitute evidence of attempts by
the Russian government to interfere in the EU referendum, just as investigations had shown
it had done in the US election.

27
135. Based on my consideration of the emails, it appeared that the Russian ambassador had
arranged for the Claimant to be introduced to a Russian businessman who offered the
Claimant lucrative investment opportunities at the exact moment that the Claimant was
seeking to impact the political future of the country through the Leave.EU campaign. These
investment opportunities were directly linked to Russian state entities. One of them was
based on confidential information about the privatisation of a state-owned entity. The
upcoming part-privatisation of Alrosa, a diamond firm, was not in the public domain at that
point. But a Russian state official facilitated a means for an important figure in UK politics to
benefit from this confidential knowledge.

136. The emails revealed that this was a serious offer which was discussed over many months
and that the Claimant had sought to arrange a trip to Moscow to take up these deals and
arrange financing with Sberbank, a sanctioned state-owned bank that is legally constrained
from doing business in Europe and the US. Mr Wigmore said in the emails that he [the
Claimant] had travelled to Moscow during this period.

137. On researching the Claimant’s Twitter feed from this period, we could see that, in the run up
to the EU referendum while he was negotiating these deals, he also wrote on Twitter that he
was investing in gold and gold mines.

138. The relationship with the ambassador carried on to the referendum and after. The Claimant
invited him to view the results of the referendum at Leave.EU’s party. The communications
with the Embassy continued throughout the summer of 2016 when the Claimant was
campaigning for Donald Trump in the US Presidential election.

139. We could also see from public information that the gold deal he was offered - a consolidation
of "six or seven" gold mines - was completed days after the referendum.

140. I considered that all this was a matter of the highest public interest and on the morning of
Friday June 8, I sent the Claimant and Mr Wigmore a detailed right-to-reply before
publication [RPC0000058, RPC0000081, RPC0000086, RPC0000088, RPC0000092,
RPC0000096, RPC0000103, RPC0000104, RPC0000108, RPC0000110, RPC0000141,
RPC0000145, RPC0000147, RPC0000153, RPC0000161, RPC0000169, RPC0000174,
RPC0000177, RPC0000179,RPC0000219, RPC0000221, RPC0000224, RPC0000226,
RPC000022, RPC0000230, RPC0001027, RPC0001028, RPC0001493]. I gave them a
deadline of 5.30pm to reply. I did not hear from him throughout the day but on Twitter, I noted
that the Claimant announced that he had cancelled his upcoming appearance before the
DCMS Select Committee that week. At 8.53pm, I received a reply from the Claimant. He said
he had been at the cricket, that he could not remember the details and that he needed until

28
 Monday in order to consult his diary. I emailed him back to extend the deadline to 12pm on
Saturday 9 June. At 10.30pm, the Claimant said that he was away and needed to access
office files so could not respond by then. I wrote back urging him to respond by the next day
and pointing out that he had staff who could look at his office files.

141. On the morning of 9 June, I emailed him back asking: “So, to be clear: you can’t remember if
you had more than one meeting with the Russian ambassador? Or if he introduced you to a
businessman offering you a multibillion dollar deal? You need to check your diary and office
computer to establish that?”. He again said he needed more time. We decided to not
proceed with the publication of a story for Sunday as originally planned, in order to
accommodate his request.

142. At about 6pm on 9 June, a story appeared on the Sunday Times website under the headline:
“Revealed Brexit Backer Arron Banks' golden Kremlin connection”. The Sunday Times article
included a response from the Claimant so we decided it was now safe for us to run a limited
story. After I had filed the story but before it went up online, I received a telephone call from
the Claimant. I had spent 36 hours asking him straightforward questions that he had refused
to respond to. It was unclear what had happened, but at the time I thought he had given the
material to the Sunday Times in order to ”scoop” our story..

143. In conversation, the Claimant confirmed that the emails were authentic. There was no
attempt to dispute or question their authenticity. He said, ”Why shouldn't I go to the Russian
embassy? It was a business deal. I'm a businessman.” I joked with him at this point, putting
on a Russian accent and saying: “What did they say, Arron? ‘Oh hello, Mr Banks. Please,
step this way. Can we interest you in special gold and diamond deal?” I then said more
seriously: “What on earth were you thinking? Did you not smell a rat? Did it never even occur
to you that you were being targeted in some way? Or that you'd been used by the Russian
embassy?”. He seemed generally subdued. He had no response to this question other than
his line about being a businessman who does business with who he likes.

144. Later on Saturday June 9, our limited report was published. The right-to-reply process is a
vital part of the process of responsible journalism. The Claimant had refused to respond to
any of my press inquiries regarding these emails even after we had given him extra time and
delayed publication.

145. The next day, the Sunday Times published multiple stories across the front page and inside.

146. On 12 June, the Claimant and Mr Wigmore appeared before the DCMS Select Committee. It
had invited the Claimant and Mr Wigmore give evidence in its investigation into “fake news”.

29
 Having cancelled their appearance after I sent them the 8 June right to reply letter, they later
agreed to attend. The Claimant and Mr Wigmore were questioned by the Committee about
all aspects of the investigation so far including alleged breaches of electoral law, alleged
breaches of data law, the source of the donation to Leave.EU, the health of the Claimant’s
businesses and the recently revealed meetings with the Russian ambassador.

147. The Claimant brought his UK passport with him to prove he had not visited Russia when Mr
Wigmore had twice referred to the Claimant visiting Russia in the emails. He had previously
told me that had diplomatic status with Belize and did not dispute that this entailed having a
diplomatic passport.

148. The Chair of the Committee, Damian Collins MP, subsequently issued a statement in which
he spoke about the “substantial public interest” in all these questions, in which he accused
the Claimant and Wigmore of lying, and in which he noted how difficult it was to get to the
truth of any of these matters. He said: "Mr Banks and Mr Wigmore themselves put on the
record that they frequently lie, exaggerate, misspeak and misunderstand.” He noted that they
were seeking answers on data sharing and misuse, campaign spending, the source of his
wealth and their meetings with high-ranking Russian officials.

149. On the Wednesday after publication (June 13) I gave an interview to the BBC's Media Show
in which I recounted the events surrounding the emails to which I had been given access. I
also said that the Claimant had lied previously about his contact with the Russian Embassy
and that he had been making accusations against me suggesting that the emails had been
obtained illegally as a distraction strategy. I said: “If I was faced with massive evidence that I
had been lying to and misleading the public for two years – and I think I can say that now
because Arron has admitted that now that he had lied about that.” The presenter interrupted
to point out that the Claimant was not there to defend himself. I said: “No, but he said in
Parliament that there were three meetings so there is absolutely no doubt and Arron has
admitted that now.” This was a very similar statement to the one I made in the TED talk and
which has led to this claim but the Claimant did not complain about what I said on this show
which was broadcast to a large BBC audience.

150. The most interesting aspect of this, to me, is why the Claimant had sought to hide this
relationship. It was not simply that the meetings and discussions identified in the emails had
taken place. It was that he had repeatedly concealed them, to me personally, and the
general public over the course of nearly two years. In the same week (after the Sunday
articles) he and Mr Wigmore went on Nigel Farage’s LBC show and said that they were
normal business meetings.

30
151. An article was published in the New York Times on June 29, 2018, in which the Claimant
was quoted as saying that the evidence he gave to Parliament was ‘“reasonably accurate”.
The article also noted that the Claimant had changed his story. It said: "In interviews earlier
this week, Mr. Banks initially said he knew nothing about the Alrosa project. Then he later
said he remembered hearing about it from the investment banker but did not pursue it." The
Claimant also admitted to a fourth meeting with Russian officials.

152. A day later, another article and interview was published in the Washington Post titled “How
the ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ forged ties with Russia and the Trump campaign — and came under
investigators’ scrutiny”. For this article, the Claimant supplied emails and text messages to
the journalist and confirmed the accuracy of ours and the Sunday Times's reporting.

153. I continued to report on the contents of the emails over the following weeks. Before every
article, I sent a detailed right-to-reply email to the Claimant [RPC0000150]. Each time, I put
detailed questions to the Claimant and included his replies in the ensuing articles. On many
of these occasions he declined to answer my questions. On others, he only answered
partially. At no point, did I suggest in the Observer or elsewhere that the Claimant had
accepted any money from the Russian government or its proxies. There was no evidence to
suggest that, and I was always careful to point that out. At no point at this time or later did I
ever suggest that the Claimant had taken the gold or diamond deal or had profited in any
way from these proposed transactions. I have never said that Russian money went into the
Brexit campaign. I have always stressed that there is no evidence to suggest it did. I have
spoken on the record multiple times about it and I have never made that suggestion or that
the Claimant is “a Russian actor".

154. These articles included: a story in which we detailed how the Claimant had sent a “message
of support” to the Russian ambassador over negative comments he faced from a UK
government minister [RPC0002210]. Another article was published on July 8, 2018, titled
'Revealed: Leave.EU campaign met Russian officials as many as 11 times' [RPC0002209].

155. I also wrote a context piece that included more personal detail about how I was shocked to
find that the Claimant and Mr Wigmore had been coordinating their social media messaging
with the Russian Embassy [RPC0002210].

156. On July 19, I did an interview with a programme on US National Public Radio (“NPR”) called
Fresh Air, a popular radio show broadcast to a very large audience in the US on radio and
online elsewhere. In the interview, I again claimed that the Claimant had been lying about his
relationship with the Russian government – the claim that I made almost a year later in my
TED talk. I also raised the question of why he was lying.

31
157. If the Claimant had complained about my presentation of the facts in the Observer articles or
in interviews or had sought to correct me, I would not have used this terminology in my TED
talk.

158. On July 29 2018, the DCMS Committee published its interim report into fake news and
disinformation [RPC0002217]. The lack of credibility of both the Claimant and Mr Wigmore as
witnesses was detailed in the DCMS report as were their misleading statements about their
relationship with Russia.

159. The report included a detailed account of the Claimant and his business dealings. The
Committee called for a complete overhaul of UK electoral laws because of the risk posed by
untraceable money such as the Claimant’s and a public inquiry into Russian interference in
UK politics, again, partly triggered by the evidence about the Claimant.

160. The publication of the interim report on July 29, 2018 marked a watershed in our reporting of
the Claimant. What the report did was to signal the high level of public interest in the media
reporting about the Claimant since the referendum and underline the known and reported
facts about his relationship to Russia, and the issue of political campaigns receiving funds
from unknown sources. The Committee’s comments about the unreliability of both the
Claimant and Mr Wigmore as witnesses were reported across the media. Neither the
Claimant nor Mr Wigmore ever made any attempt to refute these allegations in any detail.

H. Subsequent investigation of and reporting on the Claimant: July 2018 to December 2019

161. Further evidence about the Claimant continued to emerge over the next few months. Late in
July 2018, the BBC and Channel 4 ran reports about the Claimant's business deals in
southern Africa [RPC0002173, RPC0002580]. These included many serious allegations
about his business affairs there. I am not aware that he ever pursued libel proceedings in
relations to these, still less successfully. They cited documents from a court case involving
Chris Kimber, the ex-business partner of the Claimant who I had spoken to early in the year.
He said there was money coming from Russia. He said he knew this because he had been
the Claimant’s business partner. Channel 4 News’s reporting echoed much of what Mr
Kimber had told me.

162. The pieces included multiple allegations about the Claimant’s diamond mines. The
allegations in the Channel 4 News report, based on court papers, included:

a. evidence that suggested that the Claimant’s diamond mines were not productive and
did not produce diamonds;

32
 b. that he had emailed an associate asking for a blank certificate for an uncertified
diamond to bring into the UK.

c. allegations from his former business partner that he had “seeded” low-priced blood or
conflict diamonds into his mines.

d. that he had been offered the chance to participate in the privatisation of a Russian
diamond company, Alrosa, by an oligarch he was introduced to at the Russian
embassy; and

e. that Alrosa was one of the companies that he had a connection to in southern Africa.

163. A few days later, the BBC broadcast a report by Manveen Rana about the Claimant’s
business dealings in Lesotho and South Africa. This reporting included the allegation that the
Claimant had bribed a public official in Lesotho.

164. The BBC report included statements from ministers in Lesotho who stated that they had
received financial payments from the Claimant. He did not deny this claim but said it had
nothing to do with the fact that he had applied for mining licences in Lesotho. It was later
reported that the Claimant’s business dealings in South Africa were the subject of a criminal
investigation in South African by the Hawks, the country’s serious fraud squad.

165. In June 2018, I had been contacted by a friend of James Pryor, who was a business partner
of the Claimant. The friend said that Mr Pryor was running the Claimant’s four mines in
southern Africa and had also been active in the Brexit campaign. The friend suggested that
Mr Pryor had become nervous about the Claimant’s Russian connections and the FBI
investigation and he was willing to speak to me and to give me background information about
the Claimant. I was also sent information – a photograph – that showed Mr Pryor had been in
Moscow shortly after the EU referendum in June 2016.

166. Mr Pryor was subsequently interviewed by the BBC and said that the Russian ambassador
had introduced the Claimant to a business opportunity in southern Africa although he later
denied it.

167. On August 9, 2018, Luke Harding, a colleague of mine at the Guardian and a specialist on
Russian affairs, published the presentation that the Claimant had received during his visit to
the Russian Embassy on the day before he launched the Leave.EU campaign in an article
under the headline: “Revealed: details of exclusive Russian deal offered to Arron Banks in
Brexit run-up" [RPC0002218]. Leaked document lays out for first time deal proposed to
Leave.EU backer, sparking new questions over Moscow’s role.” As reported in that article,

33
 the presentation received by the Claimant was entitled “Russian gold sector consolidation
play” and featured photographs of gold bars stamped with “Russia” in Cyrillic, next to the
Russian flag. The slides set out how investors could reap huge profits from a possible
scheme to streamline Russia’s gold industry.

168. On September 23, 2018, the deputy leader of the Labour party, Tom Watson, attended an
event at the Labour party conference and in his speech alleged that the British government
had failed to take sufficient steps to protect the nation’s digital integrity, especially in political
campaigns, and that he had received information that suggested Theresa May had blocked
an investigation into the Claimant in 2016. I was also speaking at this event and wrote it up
for the Guardian.

169. On November 1, 2018, the National Crime Agency (“NCA”) announced a criminal enquiry
into the Claimant [RPC0001477]. The NCA announced that it would look into suspicions that
a “number of criminal offences may have been committed.” The Electoral Commission said in
a statement that there were reasonable grounds to suspect that the Claimant was “not the
true source” of £8m in funding to the Leave.EU campaign and that one of the Claimant’s
offshore companies was the source of a loan to the company Better for the Country (“BFTC”)
and that this could have given rise to criminal offences. It said that it had reasonable grounds
to suspect that “Leave.EU, Elizabeth Bilney (the responsible person for Leave.EU), BFTC,
Mr Banks, and possibly others, concealed the true details of these financial transactions,
including from us, and also did so by knowingly making statutory returns/reports which were
incomplete and inaccurate, or false.” This announcement yet again reinforced my view of the
strong public interest in investigating and publishing information relating to these matters.

170. On November 2, 2018, It was reported that the MP Ben Bradshaw had written to Theresa
May to ask whether it was true that a 2016 investigation into the Claimant had been blocked
by her when she was Home Secretary.

171. On November 3, 2018, Open Democracy, the New Yorker and I, in the Observer, published
articles based on new material that whistle blowers from inside Eldon Insurance/Leave.EU
had passed to us [RPC0002174]. The evidence suggested that the Claimant’s insurance
business and his Brexit campaign had worked far more closely together than he had told
MPs. Damian Collins, the Chair of the DCMS Committee, said that the evidence “flatly
contradicted” what the Claimant had told Parliament. It suggested that the work conducted by
insurance employees had not been declared to the Electoral Commission and that they may
have shared data.

34
172. The Claimant appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that same day, where he was
questioned about the NCA investigation and the source of his funds [RPC0002007]. The
Claimant began the interview by saying “I just want to be absolutely clear, there was no
Russian money and no interference of any type.” He said that the funds came from Rock
Services, a UK limited company. Andrew Marr questioned him further on this, alleging that
Rock Services was a shell company, not a trading company. The Claimant said that Rock
Services was wholly owned by Rock Holdings, an Isle of Man company, but that the money
did not come from Rock Holdings, it came from Rock Services. Mr Marr then pointed out that
the Claimant had told MPs that the money did not come from Rock Services. He also asked
the Claimant why Rock Holdings, as an Isle of Man company, was opaque. The exchange
became heated at this point. “Now you’re saying, I need to understand all of your finances.
Why?” “Because we need to know where the money came from. Lots of people don’t think
you’re as rich as you say you are and don’t believe it’s your money and that it’s come from
somewhere else.” The Claimant then repeated the claim that the money came from Rock
Services. Mr Marr said they had looked at Rock Services’ accounts in Companies House and
there was no evidence it had the funds to do so. The Claimant held up copies of his bank
account and Mr Marr said that this proved nothing.

173. On November 6, 2018, the New York Times reported that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller,
who was leading the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the US election, had
obtained the Claimant’s emails.

174. At the same time the Information Commissioner published her report into the use of data in
UK politics and her investigation into the EU referendum. Among her findings were that
companies of the Claimant had breached UK data law by unlawfully using individuals' data
and notices of intent were issued for penalties totalling £135,000.

175. On November 16, 2018, I wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books about why I
thought Britain needed a Mueller-style inquiry [RPC0001562]. This was a “portmanteau”
piece that tried to explain the many details of the many investigations into the EU referendum
in the UK to a US audience. It included details about the Claimant and made the comparison
between the level of scrutiny and official investigation in the US compared to the UK.

176. On November 27, 2018 the Claimant’s lawyers, Kingsley Napley, wrote to the Observer
complaining about references to the Claimant in an article I had written about Nigel Farage. It
disputed the accuracy of two references to the Claimant and requested a correction. It did
not complain about any of the public statements I had made previously in which I claimed the
Claimant lied about his visits to the Russian Embassy. I took this to be confirmation that he

35
 did not dispute lying, otherwise he would have raised it in that letter, not to mention on the
numerous previous occasions when I had offered him a right to reply. Or the Guardian
article in which I explicitly made the same statement as in the TED talk and that said that the
Claimant had lied [RPC0002210].

177. In December 2018, John Sweeney on BBC Newsnight broadcast a report on the Claimant’s
finances and Russian connections. The Claimant had given his bank accounts and emails to
the researchers on the Marr programme to prove the source of the donation to Leave.EU.
This included a note that instructed the Claimant’s employee to “Redact the name Ural
Properties”. The BBC discovered an off-shore Gibraltar-registered entity called ‘Ural
Properties’ was linked to the Claimant’s companies and owned two flats on the top floor of a
luxury apartment tower in Portsmouth overlooking the city’s naval base.

178. Also, in December 2018, I was contacted by witnesses who had given evidence to the NCA
in relation to its investigation into the Claimant [RPC0001603, RPC0001604, RPC0001611,
RPC0001618]. The witnesses included a South African forensic investigator, Paul O’Sullivan,
who had supplied documents and sworn witness statements about the Claimant’s South
African and Lesotho business dealings [RPC0001625, RPC0001637, RPC0001648,
RPC0001689]. These suggested that the Claimant was laundering conflict diamonds through
his diamond mines and that there had been an approach to do business from Russia,
including from Alrosa, which predated the meeting at the Russian Embassy referred to in the
emails. It suggested to me that the Claimant may have been targeted on two separate
occasions, both times using diamonds, in which he had a documented interest and
investment, as a lure. This material also included the sworn statements of Chris Kimber who
I had previously spoken to.

179. Mr O’Sullivan said that he had been interviewed by the NCA about the Claimant’s business
activities. He explained that he had given all this evidence to the South African authorities.
He was happy to go on record and we recorded a film of him making these allegations in the
Guardian’s offices [RPC0000909].

180. Luke Harding subsequently told me that he had been contacted by the NCA. He said that he
had been interviewed, with regard to the NCA’s investigation into the Claimant, about the
meeting referred to in the emails concerning the gold deal which involved the Russian
ambassador and a Russian businessmen called Siman Povarenkin.

181. On February 18, 2019, the DCMS Select Committee published its final report on fake news
and disinformation [RPC0001727, RPC0001728]. This contained even more evidence about
how technology platforms had created huge vulnerabilities for the security of our elections

36
 and political discourse. The Committee repeated its earlier calls for an inquiry into the
referendum and new legislation to protect our elections. The government did not respond.

182. On March 5, 2019, Channel 4 broadcast a further investigation into the Claimant’s dealings
with Russia [RPC0002583]. This was largely based on the emails on which we had
previously reported but it included some new details and comments from authoritative
experts. Channel 4 had obtained a further document which priced the cost of buying the gold
companies at $4 billion and set out that the deal would be funded by "friends of
GeoProMining" and the sanctioned Russian bank Sberbank and suggested meetings with
the Claimant or his associates and Sberbank in Moscow. The Claimant had previously told
ITN that he had not had meetings about investments in Russia because he knows it is a
complicated place to do business. The new documents contradicted that assertion. The
report also included an interview with a former head of GCHQ, Sir David Omand, who said
that the proposed deal had the appearance of a Russian influence operation.

183. In this period, I also spoke to individuals on an off the record basis about the Claimant. One
was an individual who worked at an agency that was contracted to undertake work
countering Russian disinformation in Europe on behalf of a government agency. He was an
ex-FCO official who now worked on a contracted basis for a government agency. I verified
the individual’s status by checking his LinkedIn profile and meeting him with his colleagues at
his place of work, which was an agency that had an official contract with the FCO. He got in
contact with me because he said he was alarmed by information that he had come across
that implicated the Claimant in a Russian influence operation.

184. He told me that their work had included discovering a network of individuals and
organisations across Europe who were connected to, or funded by, Russia and that they
could also see that these connections reached into the UK. He said that they were prohibited
from officially investigating these connections in the UK because of their contract with the a
government department but there was certain intelligence they were able to pass on. This
consisted of two intelligence files, which were provided to me [RPC0001881, RPC0001893].
One detailed allegations of the Claimant’s involvement in organised crime in South Africa,
including money laundering and cigarette and diamond smuggling. The other concerned his
wife, Katya Banks. It claimed that she had entered Britain on a passport which was
sequentially numbered to the passport of Katia Zatuliveter. Ms Zatuliveter was the woman
MI5 had claimed was a Russian spy and who had had an affair with the Portsmouth MP,
Mike Hancock, with whom it had been alleged that Katya Banks had also a relationship.

37
185. This detail about the passports was striking because of an investigation by the open-source
intelligence organisation, Bellingcat, into the Skripal affair. They had identified two men in
CCTV photos as Russian intelligence officers partly through evidence that the men's
passport numbers were only separated by three digits and were therefore issued at nearly
the same time.

186. The dossiers were very detailed and contained a wealth of information that was not in the
public domain. It appeared to have come from human intelligence sources and there were
inclusions - such as photographs from Ms Paderina's notebook with personal details – that
were from non-public sources. Because of the detail and the sourcing, I found the suggestion
that Katya Banks was linked in some way to Russian intelligence potentially credible. I also
knew that the Kremlin had a track record in channelling money and influence operations via
the wives of oligarchs. A specialist Russian investigator told me that they “always look at the
wives”.

187. Because of the nature and credibility of the source I believed that these dossiers had been
compiled in good faith. I could not verify the information journalistically but I understood it to
have been authored by individuals close to, if not in, the intelligence services. I also
understood that there were people working within the UK’s national security infrastructure
who were concerned that the intelligence services were not doing their job. (This was
confirmed to be true in 2020 when the Intelligence and Security Committee finally published
a report into Russian interference. MPs subsequently revealed that the intelligence services
had not found evidence of foreign interference “because they had not looked”.)

188. On March 18, 2019, the New Yorker published a long piece about the Claimant by Ed
Caesar [RPC0002584]. This piece went much further than I ever had in suggesting that the
Claimant and/or his wife may have been an agent or asset of the Russians. In particular,
there was evidence from a former GRU officer, Boris Volodarsky, who made this specific
claim. It also claimed that Alexander Udod - who had arranged the meetings for the Claimant
with the Ambassador - was the handler for Katia Zatuliveter. I do not believe that the
Claimant threatened legal action against the publication in respect of those allegations or the
implication throughout the piece that Russian money may have funded the Leave campaign.
Nor did I believe that he threatened to take or take legal action against the journalist, a British
citizen who lives in the UK.

I. The TED talk

189. In the summer of 2018, I was contacted by Cyndi Stivers, an editor and curator for the TED
organisation and conference [RPC0001467]. She asked me if I would be interested in giving

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 a talk at the following year’s main conference in Vancouver. She said that she had followed
my investigations and thought it would make an interesting talk. I wrote the first draft in mid-
February, 2019 [RPC0001739, RPC0002094, RPC0001735]. I then revised and re-drafted
up until I delivered it at TED’s main conference in Vancouver on April 15, 2019
[RPC0002215].

190. At the time I was preparing the talk, the FBI and congressional investigations in the United
States were in the headlines every day. In the UK, criminal investigations had been opened
into aspects of the referendum but it was still being barely reported on. Very few people knew
anything at all about it and it was ignored by most newspapers and politicians. Most people
did not understand the role of the technology platforms in undermining the integrity of our
electoral processes. In the talk I was trying to explain how social media had up-ended our
ability to have free and fair elections and referendums while pulling in details about the
specific questions in the UK. At the time I gave the TED talk, my primary focus was on the
unaccountable role of the tech platforms and their threat to democracy. This was based on
two and a half years of investigative journalism that had been published in the Guardian and
Observer.

191. It was via investigating what had happened in the EU referendum in Britain that I had
become aware of these interconnected issues. The referendum had been a perfect storm. At
the time, we had no idea that these social platforms could be exploited by bad actors in a
myriad of different ways. Our laws and reporting structures relied upon gentlemen’s
agreements – election and referendum spending returns were only reported after the event.
And, the case of the referendum, social media had collapsed all regulatory safeguards right
at the moment that the stakes were so high: the referendum was a one-off, once in a lifetime
vote.

192. What I had discovered was that multiple people had exploited this situation in multiple ways. I
also felt that journalism had done its job. But the government had not. My reporting and that
of many colleagues across many publications had collectively shone a light into the inner
workings of social media and politics. Our journalism had instigated investigations by the
Electoral Commission, the ICO and Metropolitan Police and the NCA. But there was a
widespread consensus amongst experts, MPs and sources within the intelligence community
that the government was deliberately ignoring the inadequacy of our legislation to prevent
this happening again, the power and unaccountability of the tech platforms that had led us to
this place and the possibility that Russia had attacked and undermined electoral processes,
including potentially the referendum in the UK, as the FBI had shown it to have attacked an
election in the US.

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193. The investigations in the US were in stark contrast to those in the UK. An entire department
of the FBI had already spent two years investigating what had happened and individuals and
organisations under scrutiny in the US were directly linked to individuals and organisations in
the UK. In particular Robert Mueller’s investigation had found the Russian ambassador in
London to be a conduit between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. My reporting had
shown that the Claimant had concealed information about the extent of his contact with the
ambassador.

194. The focus of my concern has always been on the bigger structural issues: the vulnerabilities
in our national security and electoral integrity that the tech platforms have created. The
offshore infrastructure that enables millionaires to shelter their funds in dark jurisdictions. The
lack of legislation and safeguards to protect our electoral processes from money from
unknown origins. The determination of foreign powers to interfere in our democracy.

195. I also thought that the British authorities were seeking to bury evidence of Russian
interference in British politics. I wanted to draw out the close links and ties for example
between Mr Farage and individuals in the Trump campaign who had been indicted by the
FBI. At that time, I believed that the US investigations into Russian interference were the only
possible way we might find out what happened in the UK context.

J. The inclusion of the Claimant in the TED Talk

196. In the earlier drafts of the TED talk, I did not have the line about the Claimant. I added it later.
There were various reasons behind this. I was talking about the threats to the democratic
process posed by social media platforms. But I decided to ground this in the specifics of one
particular instance which had been the focus of much of my reporting: the 2016 EU
referendum. I was giving the talk in North America to a predominantly North American
audience and I wanted to explain how what had happened in the UK did not happen in
isolation. There was a common link to what was happening online globally. But in particular,
the EU referendum and the 2016 Trump campaign were entwined by multiple threads.

197. I introduced the Claimant, along with Mr Farage, in the later drafts of the TED talk to
underscore the links between the Brexit vote and the election of Mr Trump. My intention was
to keep the focus on the bigger picture of the Facebook’s monopolistic capture of our
elections. But I had to make it understandable to a general audience and the easiest way to
do that was to tell the story of my investigation. This included the catalogue of serious
offences that had been committed in the referendum and the transatlantic relationship
between the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

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198. The Claimant as the main funder of Mr Farage’s Leave.EU campaign was a key figure in
these connections. He was one of the self-described “Bad Boys of Brexit” who had gone on
to campaign for Mr Trump. He was with Mr Farage when they became the first foreign
visitors to visit Mr Trump in Trump Tower after the election and they continued to support his
movement in the years following the election.

199. I did not think I was saying anything controversial about the Claimant. I had made the same
points repeatedly on previous occasions. I had said that he had lied about the number of
meetings he had had with the Russian ambassador a number of times. The Observer and
the Sunday Times had published incontrovertible evidence that he had lied about his
meetings with the Russian ambassador. The findings of Parliament’s DCMS Committee
which concluded that he had lied and that he was an unreliable witness was widely reported.
He had never sought to refute the Committee’s allegations in any detail. He had never written
to the Observer to correct the record, to deny the claim about the number of meetings, nor
had he threatened legal action even though I made the same explicit claim in the newspaper.
And he had never responded to my right-to-replies on this issue. His lawyers wrote to the
Observer in 2018 to complain about minor details but this was not among them. He never
responded in detail to any of my detailed inquiries and instead of giving proper answers in
response to my reporting issued blanket insults and impugned my professionalism. It is my
understanding that he did not complain to the New Yorker for including the claim his wife
may have been a Russian spy. Finally, he had never offered any proper explanation for why
he had changed his stories so many times.

200. I did not consider that the TED talk alleged that the Claimant had received money from the
Russian government in relation to the Brexit campaign in breach of the rules on foreign
funding. I had no evidence to suggest that he had accepted any money either directly or
indirectly and I’d always been very careful to stress that. I accept that the judge found that
the speech taken as a whole bore the meaning that the Claimant had “a secret relationship…
with the Russian Government in relation to acceptance of foreign than funding of electoral
campaigns in breach of the law on such funding”, however that was absolutely not what I
thought the speech meant.

201. I considered that the line regarding the Claimant meant that he lied about his relationship
with Russia. This is what I meant by a “covert relationship”. It had been hidden from public
view. This was something I had published on many occasions previously without complaint.

202.  I included the line about him being referred to the NCA because the Electoral Commission
had spent a year investigating the source of the donation to Leave.EU and had said it could

41
 not confirm the true source of it. This left an open question about where this money had
come from.

203. My view, which I had expressed many times, was that given the opacity of the Claimant’s
finances, his money should have been nowhere near our elections or referendums. This
entire issue had only come about because of electoral laws which are inadequate and
outdated and do not sufficiently safeguard the integrity of our elections.

204. I did not think and certainly had no evidence to suggest that the Claimant had received
money from the Russian state. It is my understanding that he did not solicit the meeting at
the Russian embassy or the introduction to Siman Povarenkin, the oligarch who made the
offer of business deals. However, I thought it possible the Claimant had been groomed and
targeted. The key meeting was the day before the big press launch for the Leave.EU
campaign.

205. I had investigated many aspects of the Claimant’s campaign and business affairs over two
and a half years, but I was genuinely shocked by the revelations contained in the emails.
Perhaps in 2016, these meetings seemed more innocent, but in 2019, they could not be
divorced from the context of Russian intelligence officers from the GRU having used a
prohibited nerve agent which killed a British civilian on a British street; military intelligence
officers from the GRU having been being revealed to have co-ordinated the hack-and-leak of
Democratic emails to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign and boost Donald Trump’s campaign;
and Russia’s funding of political parties across Europe.

206. It was also in the context of the Claimant saying he was “pro Putin” and supported Russia’s
foreign policy goals. He had personal relationships which connected him to Russia. The FBI
investigation identified the Russian ambassador in London as an important figure in its
investigation into election interference. And the Russian diplomat who had arranged the
meeting with the Claimant and the Ambassador had been expelled from the UK as a spy.

207. I trusted the reporting of far more expert financial journalists than myself. They had
repeatedly written that the Claimant had far less money than he made out and that the
source of his donation to Leave.EU was opaque and unclear. Over the course of two and a
half years, a small group of journalists and investigators had diligently uncovered a myriad of
potential offences and serious issues relating to national security and electoral integrity. I
drew on their reporting and the expertise of Russian specialists such as the writer and
academic Anne Applebaum and the anti-corruption campaigner Bill Browder who had raised
warnings about Russian interference in UK politics.

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208. I believed that there was the highest public interest in speaking out about these matters and
particularly so in an international context. There appeared to be very serious and real
concerns by many senior figures in Britain that the government was deliberately blocking a
proper investigation into these issues. Senior Conservative MPs, the deputy leader of the
Labour party and a whole range of Russia experts had made similar points.

209. It is for these reasons that I included the Claimant in my TED Talk. My reasons were based
on rigorous reporting over two and a half years and in the light of multiple investigations
opened by the UK authorities.

210. It did not at any time occur to me to send a right-of-reply to the Claimant in the context of the
TED Talk. I was reporting nothing new. I had said every fact in my talk many times before.
The Claimant had refused to answer any of my questions on the contents of the emails which
had been provided to me in June 2018relating to Russia. Furthermore, the Claimant had
confirmed to the Sunday Times and the Washington Post the truth of events disclosed in
those emails and had even handed over more of them to a Washington Post reporter
[RPC0002009, RPC0002169]. Since they were exposed in June 2018, he had never sought
to deny that the meetings evidenced in the emails took place. The detail of these meetings
was now not just the subject of reports in the Observer, Sunday Times, CNN, the New York
Times, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair and many others but a matter of parliamentary
record [CAD00000178, RPC0002009, RPC0002169]. Accordingly, it did not even occur to
me that almost a year later, the Claimant would object to my words. He had acknowledged to
Parliament that there was more than one meeting. He accepted therefore that he had lied.

211. I had been reporting this story for two and a half years at this point. It was an extraordinarily
difficult story to tell and during this time I had put right-to-replies to hundreds of people. I
have worked closely with the Guardian’s head of legal affairs, Gill Phillips, and the rest of the
legal department over many aspects of this reporting. I have learned directly from them how
and when to send right to replies to individuals who are the subjects of my reporting. I would
never make a new allegation in an article without first going to the individual concerned for
comment. But I was not breaking news at a TED conference. There was no new allegation.

212. Many other highly experienced editors also read the talk. Not one of them suggested that I
should put in new right to replies or have the talk legalled. At TED, my curator Cyndi Stivers
read many drafts of the talk. She is a highly experienced journalist and editor who has
worked for multiple news organisations.

213. At the Observer, my main editor on the story, Sarah Donaldson, read several drafts of the
talk and gave feedback. She had been closely involved with the reporting of the story

43
 throughout the three years and had responsibility for managing the legal and due diligence
aspects of it. I trusted her judgement as an editor absolutely. She knew all about the
intricacies and the pitfalls of reporting on the Claimant. She was not responsible for the talk
nor was it published on the Guardian's platform, but she did not suggest I submit new right to
replies or seek legal advice.

214. I also sent it to Jane Ferguson, the editor of the Observer New Review, for feedback. She
has been one of my main editors at the Observer for the 16 years I have worked there. She
has decades of editing experience and has often given me critical feedback and valued
advice. She also did not spot any issues.

215. The Guardian head of communications, Brendan O’Grady, suggested that I send the talk to
him, which I did. He handles the public talks of senior executives at the news organisation
and I understood to him have experience in these issues and potential pitfalls. He did not
suggest I should have it legally reviewed

216. I also sent it to John Mulholland, the editor of Guardian US. He had been the editor of the
Observer until March 2018 and as such had been ultimately responsible for my reporting
during that time. The newspaper had dealt with legal challenges from major technology
companies and several very wealthy individuals, and the reporting difficulties and legal risks
had been a major preoccupation throughout this time. He gave me helpful feedback on
earlier drafts and read and commented on a later one which included the line about the
Claimant’s covert relationship with the Russian government. He did not note the line nor
suggest I seek a right-to-reply nor get legal advice.

217. When I arrived in Vancouver for the conference, legal checks, compliance, and fact checking
were carried out on the talk. I know, for example, on permissions for the photographs I used.
I also delivered the speech at a rehearsal in front of TED’s senior leadership. Again, no-one
suggested there might be further editorial or legal checks required.

218. My opinion was and is that technology has fatally undermined our ability to hold free and fair
elections. In a few short years, political campaigning went from being about leaflets and TV
ads to being carried out overwhelmingly online in darkness on privately owned opaque
platforms, predominantly Facebook. All money spent on digital campaigning was, in 2016,
entirely untraceable. Anyone from anywhere could spend any amount of money. Our
electoral laws - that depend on trust, transparency and the control of money spent by political
parties - simply do not work any more.

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219. The EU referendum happened at a moment in which technological changes created what
would turn out to be a perfect storm. There is no archive, no evidence, no possible way to
research what actually happened in any election or referendum that happened anywhere in
the world in that year, including the one that resulted in a change to Britain’s constitution.
Two months after my reporting of the CA scandal, Facebook changed its policies on political
advertisements. It now archives them and records who placed them and how much they
cost. It did not retrospectively apply this change.

220. It is now clear that it was not just domestic campaigns that had taken advantage of this
opacity. In the US, the FBI had found Russia had exploited the same vulnerability to attack
the 2016 US presidential election. By 2019, we understood how Facebook in 2016 was an
attack surface for any motivated individual or nation state to exploit.

221. I have no evidence that the Russian government set up the meeting with the Claimant the
day before he launched his Leave.EU campaign and introduced him to lucrative commercial
deals for any reason other than to help him personally. And the timing may just be
coincidental. I sincerely hope so. But our inability to police the money spent in our elections
is a regulatory failure at the heart of our democracy. We have no means of ensuring the
integrity of our elections while Facebook is unregulated and our electoral laws remain
hopelessly unenforceable. I believed there was an overwhelming public interest in raising
this, for us in Britain, and as a warning to all countries elsewhere.

K. The Tweet

222. On 24 June 2019, I received a pre-action letter from the Claimant. My understanding is that
he was concerned about the content of a Netflix documentary that I was in. I had tweeted the
trailer of the film and had suggested the Claimant was in it. The producers of the
documentary also received a pre-action letter. I posted the tweet which is complained of in
this case (“the Tweet”) on 24 June 2019.

223. Although I accept the meaning that the Judge found in relation to the Tweet, it referred to and
repeated the same allegation I had made many times before – that the Claimant had lied
about the number of meetings he had with the Russian Government.

224. As previously stated, this was due to the inaccurate and inconsistent statements the
Claimant had made about his contact with the Russian government. I will not repeat the
matters raised above but it seemed clear to me that the statement about contacts with the
Russian government is accurate.

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225. In addition the pre-action letters seemed to be an attempt by the Claimant to stifle the
distribution of a documentary and stymie my investigation into the Claimant's political
activities. It is my belief that this legal action potentially shuts down journalists’ participation in
public life. As far as I am aware, there have been no subsequent investigations into the
Claimant’s business affairs since this claim was filed.

L. Events after the TED talk and the posting of the Tweet

226. The Claimant has made allegations about various matters which post-date the TED talk and
the Tweet. I respond to those allegations below.

227. The Claimant has complained about the fact that I originally defended the claim on the basis
of truth and limitation. This was done on the advice of my lawyers (as to which I do not waive
privilege). Those defences were withdrawn after Mr Justice Saini had clarified the meanings
which he had found the TED talk and the Tweet to bear.

228. The Claimant has raised issues about a tweet I sent on 22 October 2020. The tweet was in
relation to Leave.EU having committed offences, and having been fined £70,000. In
publishing that tweet I erroneously conflated the Claimant with Leave.EU, due to him having
founded Leave.EU and owning 75% of the voting rights of Leave.EU Group Limited. I
therefore was in error when I said that the Claimant had broken the law, rather than saying
that Leave.EU broken the law. This was a mistake and I deleted the Tweet after the error
was pointed out to me and I later apologised. The apology was not immediate only because
my lawyers were in discussions with the Claimant's lawyers as to the wording of the apology.

229. Objections have also been made by the Claimant about the contents of a case update in
February 2021 included on two webpages aimed at raising funds for the purposes of my
defence to this claim. Those updates concerned this litigation and were written by Bindmans,
who were at that time my solicitors in this case. It did not occur to me to question their
contents. After the Claimant raised issues about them late on 8 February, 2021, they were
taken down on 9 February, 2021 and Bindmans wrote on my behalf to the Claimant about
those updates on 25 March 2021.

230. The Claimant has also complained that I have taken no steps to qualify the statement
complained of in the TED talk or to take down the Tweet. However, I have no influence over
TED’s internal editorial processes and it would be inappropriate of me to think I could tell an
independent media organisation what to publish or not publish. I do not know of any instance
in which the organisation has retrospectively edited a TED talk. I retweeted a link to the TED
talk on the day the talk was published by TED nearly two and a half years ago. It is not

46
 visible to the public unless they use a search function or went back through thousands of my
subsequent tweets. Since then, from what I can see, I have only re-tweeted an edited social
media version of the talk, which is four minutes, 15 seconds long and does not reference the
Claimant in any way and does not link to the full version of the talk. There is still a link to the
talk on the gofundme crowd funding page. This was and remains part of the fundraising effort
towards enabling me to defend this claim.

Statement of truth and confirmation of compliance

I believe that the facts stated in this Witness Statement are true. I understand that proceedings for
contempt of court may be brought against anyone who makes, or causes to be made, a false
statement in a document verified by a statement of truth and without an honest belief in its truth.

I understand that the purpose of this witness statement is to set out matters of fact of which I have
personal knowledge. I understand that it is not my function to argue the case, either generally or
on particular points, or to take the court through the documents in the case. This witness
statement sets out only my personal knowledge and recollection, in my own words.

On points that I understand to be important to the case, I have stated honestly (a) how well I recall
matters and (b) whether my memory has been refreshed by considering documents, and if so how
and when.

I have not been asked or encouraged by anyone to include in this statement anything that is not
my own account, to the best of my ability and recollection, of events I witnessed or matters of
which I have personal knowledge.

Signature

Name Carole Cadwalladr

Date 23 November 2021

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