RE: 3p2 Jun 2023 17:23
Just read this..
https://westcountryvoices.co.uk/tough-times-for-putins-fellow-travellers-in-the-uk/
...
The links between Russia and other leading supporters and bankrollers of Brexit are less well known. Take Banks’ close associate Jim Mellon, a multi-millionaire with whom Banks owned a bank in the Isle of Man and who gave £100,000 to Banks’ Brexit campaign. Mellon’s fortune originally derived from the chaotic world of 1990s Russia.
“I had read somewhere that Russia was privatising its industry and that they were handing out certificates that represented a share of the post-Soviet state to every adult,” Mellon has explained.
He bought up large numbers of these certificates at rock-bottom prices from Russians who “did not think they were worth more than a bottle of vodka”.
Mellon’s company Charlemagne Capital, and funds that it controls, went on to take advantage of many other opportunities in Putin’s Russia, not least the privatisation of Russian fossil fuel companies such as Gazprom.
It also benefited from one of the “business opportunities” held out to Arron Banks by Russian agents in 2016. Three weeks after the Brexit referendum, the Russian government sold its stake in the Alrosa diamond-mining company through a private offering to a restricted group of investors, at a discount to the company’s market price. A fund managed by Charlemagne Capital was one of these.