The former leader of Reform UK in Wales has been sentenced to 10 and a half years after he admitted accepting tens of thousands of pounds in cash to make pro-Russian statements to the media and European Parliament.

Nathan Gill had “abused a position of significant authority and trust” and was “motivated by financial and political gain”, said Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb during remarks at the Old Bailey on Friday.

Gill, 52, of Anglesey, North Wales, had previously pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery between 6 December 2018 and 18 July 2019, corresponding to his time as an MEP.

The Old Bailey heard his activities were linked to pro-Russian statements about Ukraine while he was a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and subsequently the Brexit Party.

Following an investigation by counter-terrorism police, officers said they believe Gill likely took a minimum of £40,000 in cash and was offering to introduce other British MEPs so they could be bribed. Officers also said they believed some individuals in this case had a direct link to Vladimir Putin.

Prosecutor Mark Heywood KC previously told the court the bribery offences related to Gill’s association with pro-Russian Oleg Voloshyn, who had been a Ukrainian government official before 2014 and was sanctioned by the UK in 2022.

Gill’s activities emerged in WhatsApp messages after he was stopped at Manchester Airport on 13 September 2021.

He was about to board a flight to Russia to be an observer in elections there.

Bundles of cash recovered

Police said the messages revealed Voloshyn had tasked Gill to make pro-Russian statements on a reward basis. Counter-terrorism officers said the text of some speeches was provided to Gill, which he delivered almost word-for-word.

In other cases, he was paid to offer commentary to news outlets, such as the pro-Russian media organisation 112 Ukraine.

A search of his home in Wales also uncovered thousands in euros and dollars.

Greed ‘primary motivation’

Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, described Gill as being motivated by money.

“It appears… greed was his primary motivation. But I think there’s an element of him that had a pro-Russian stance as well, but only he can answer that question, to be honest with you, he never told us that.”

Gill was interviewed in March 2022 and made no comment. He was charged and appeared in court in February 2025.

‘A grave betrayal of trust’

During sentencing, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb described Gill’s offending as “sophisticated” and “a grave betrayal of the trust vested in you by the electorate”.

She told him: “You accepted payments from foreign nationals, made statements on important international matters at their behest, utilised scripted material presented as your own, and orchestrated the involvement of other MPs.

“Your misconduct has ramifications far beyond personal honour, which is now irretrievably damaged. It erodes public confidence in democracy when politicians succumb to financial inducement.”

Other UK politicians at risk

Commander Murphy said that police were continuing to investigate other MEPs, including some from the UK.

“What we do know from the conversations with [Oleg] Voloshyn is that Nathan Gill actually offered his services to contact other MEPs, mostly UK MEPs, to also make statements that might be supportive of a Russian position in Ukraine,” he said.

He added: “I do believe that some of the individuals in this case do have direct connections to Vladimir Putin. And I have no doubt that if we were able to, we could follow this trail and it would lead straight to Moscow.”

Gill led the Welsh wing of UKIP between 2014 and 2016 and was a member of the Senedd between 2016 and 2017.

He was an MEP between 2014 and 2020, but left UKIP in 2019 to join Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party – later Reform UK.

Political fallout after prison term

Police have confirmed Nigel Farage has not been part of this investigation, but political rivals have called on the Reform UK leader to launch a thorough investigation.

Defence minister Al Carns, a former colonel in the Royal Marines, said Gill’s actions were “a disgrace”. He added: “I just think wherever we see Russian influence in UK politics, it’s got to be weeded out.”

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Meanwhile, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said “a traitor was at the very top of Reform UK”, referring to Gill, but also launched a direct attack on Mr Farage by calling him, and his party, “a danger to national security”.

“Nigel Farage himself was previously paid to be on Putin’s TV channel, Russia Today, and said he was the world leader he admires the most.

“We must all ask – where do his loyalties really lie? We need a full investigation into Russian interference in our politics,” he said.

Reform UK, which previously kicked Gill out of the party, said in a statement: “Mr Gill’s actions were reprehensible, treasonous and unforgivable. We are glad that justice has been served and fully welcome the sentence Nathan Gill has received.”

Liz Saville Roberts, Plaid Cymru’s Westminster leader, welcomed Gill’s jail sentence “for his acts of betrayal in taking bribes from Russia”.

In a statement, she said: “If the former Reform UK leader in Wales was part of a broader, co-ordinated effort to advance Moscow’s agenda within our democratic institutions, then the public deserves to know the full truth, and how far Russian money and influence reached into Nigel Farage’s inner circle.”

Britons buying cocaine on a Friday night could be inadvertently funding Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The National Crime Agency has revealed a billion-dollar money laundering network is operating in 28 towns and cities across the UK.

Couriers collect “dirty” cash generated from drugs, firearms and immigration gangs, which is then converted into cryptocurrency.

Officials say these illicit transactions have a direct link to “geopolitical events causing suffering around the world”.

This network was first exposed because of Operation Destabilise – and to date, 128 arrests have been made, with more than £25m in cash and digital assets seized.

According to the NCA, the enterprise is so prolific that it purchased a bank to facilitate payments that supported Russia’s military efforts and helped sidestep sanctions.

Posters have been put up in motorway service stations to target couriers, which warn it is “just a matter of time” before they will be arrested.

The NCA’s deputy director for economic crime, Sal Melki, has warned the threat posed by this money laundering network is significant.

He added: “Cash couriers play an intrinsic role in this global scheme. They are in our communities and making the criminal ecosystem function – because if you cannot profit from your crimes, why bother.

“They are paid very little for the risks they take and face years in prison, while those they work for enjoy huge profits.”

Mr Melki went on to warn that “easy money leads to hard time” – and earning just a few hundred pounds through laundering could lead to years behind bars.

The NCA says Operation Destabilise has already had an impact in criminal circles, with some members of the network now reluctant to operate in London.

Those involved in the money laundering effort have also started to charge higher fees – reflecting the difficulty of cleaning ill-gotten gains.

Cryptocurrencies are often regarded as a haven for criminals because they are perceived to be anonymous, but it is possible to trace these transactions.

Chainalysis is a company that monitors suspicious activity on blockchains, a type of database that keeps records of who sends and receives digital assets – as well as how much.

Its vice president of communications Madeleine Kennedy told Sky News: “Public blockchains are transparent by design, which makes cryptocurrencies a poor vehicle for money laundering.

“With the right tools, law enforcement can trace illicit funds – whether they’re connected to drug trafficking, sanctions evasion, or cybercrime – and use those insights to disrupt networks and recover assets.”

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Last December, a global investigation led by the NCA smashed two networks whose money laundering activities were prevalent in 30 countries.

Bundles of cash were seized during raids, with detectives describing Smart and TGR as the invisible link between “Russian elites, crypto-rich cybercriminals and drug gangs in the UK”.

One of the network’s ringleaders, a Russian national called Ekatarina Zhdanova, is currently in custody in France and awaiting trial for separate financial offences.

Security minister Dan Jarvis added: “This complex operation has exposed the corrupt tactics Russia used to avoid sanctions and fund its illegal war in Ukraine.

“We are working tirelessly to detect, disrupt and prosecute anyone engaging in activity for a hostile foreign state. It will never be tolerated on our streets.”

Households and businesses will have to wait for energy bills to fall significantly because “there’s no shortcut” to bringing down prices, the energy minister has told Sky News.

Speaking as Chancellor Rachel Reeves considers ways of easing the pressure on households in next week’s budget, energy minister Michael Shanks conceded that Labour’s election pledge to cut bills by £300 by converting the UK to clean power has not been delivered.

It comes as the energy regulator Ofgem is set to announce its latest price cap this morning. Analysts expect the cap, which currently sits at £1,755 per year, to fall by 1% for a typical household – leaving energy bills still 35% higher than pre-Ukraine war levels.

The UK has the second-highest domestic and the highest industrial electricity prices among developed nations, despite renewable sources providing more than 50% of UK electricity last year.

“The truth is, we do have to build that infrastructure in order to remove the volatility of fossil fuels from people’s bills,” Mr Shanks said.

“We obviously hope that that will happen as quickly as possible, but there’s no shortcut to this, and there’s not an easy solution to building the clean power system that brings down bills.”

His comments come amid growing scepticism about the compatibility of cutting bills as well as carbon emissions, and growing evidence that the government’s pursuit of a clean power grid by 2030 is contributing to higher bills.

While wholesale gas prices have fallen from their peak following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, energy bills remain around 35% higher than before the war, inflated by the rising cost of reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

The price of subsidising offshore wind and building and managing the grid has increased sharply, driven by supply chain inflation and the rising cost of financing major capital projects.

In response, the government has had to increase the maximum price it will pay for offshore wind by more than 10% in the latest renewables auction, and extend price guarantees from 15 years to 20.

The auction concludes early next year, but it’s possible it could see the price of new wind power set higher than the current average wholesale cost of electricity, primarily set by gas.

Renewable subsidies and network costs make up more than a third of bills and are set to grow. The cost of new nuclear power generation will be added to bills from January.

The government has also increased so-called social costs funded through bills, including the warm home discount, a £150 payment made to around six million of the least-affluent households.

Gas remains central to the UK’s power network, with around 50 active gas-fired power stations underpinning an increasingly renewable grid, and is also crucial to pricing.

Because of the way the energy market works, wholesale gas sets the price for all sources of electricity, the majority of the time.

At Connah’s Quay, a gas-fired power station run by the German state-owned energy company Uniper on the Dee estuary in north Wales, four giant turbines, each capable of powering 300,000 homes, are fired up on demand when the grid needs them.

Energy boss: Remove policy costs from bills

Because renewables are intermittent, the UK will need to maintain and pay for a full gas network, even when renewables make up the majority of generation, and we use it a fraction of the time.

“The fundamental problem is we cannot store electricity in very large volumes, and so we have to have these plants ready to generate when customers need it,” says Michael Lewis, chief executive of Uniper.

“You’re paying for hundreds of hours when they are not used, but they’re still there and they’re ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

He agrees that shifting away from gas will ultimately reduce costs, but there are measures the government can take in the short term.

“We have quite a lot of policy costs on our energy bills in the UK, for instance, renewables incentives, a warm home discount and other taxes. If we remove those from energy bills and put them into general taxation, that will have a big dampening effect on energy prices, but fundamentally it is about gas.”

The chancellor is understood to be considering a range of options to cut bills in the short term, including shifting some policy costs and green levies from bills into general taxation, as well as cutting VAT.

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Tories and Reform against green energy

Stubbornly high energy bills have already fractured the political consensus on net zero among the major parties.

Under Kemi Badenoch, the Conservatives have reversed a policy introduced by Theresa May. Shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho, who held the post in the last Conservative government, explained why: “Net zero is now forcing people to make decisions which are making people poorer. And that’s not what people signed up to.

“So when it comes to energy bills, we know that they’re going up over the next five years to pay for green levies.

“We are losing jobs to other countries, industry is going, and that not only is a bad thing for our country, but it also is a bad thing for climate change.”

Reform UK, meanwhile, have made opposition to net zero a central theme.

“No more renewables,” says Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice. “They’ve been a catastrophe… that’s the reason why we’ve got the highest electricity prices in the developed world because of the scandal and the lies told about renewables.

“They haven’t made our energy cheaper, they haven’t brought down the bills.”

Mr Shanks says his opponents are wrong and insists renewables remain the only long-term choice: “The cost of subsidy is increasing because of the global cost of building things, but it’s still significantly cheaper than it would be to build gas.

“And look, there’s a bigger argument here, that we’re all still paying the price of the volatility of fossil fuels. And in the past 50 years, more than half of the economic shocks this country’s faced have been the direct result of fossil fuel crises across the world.”