Banks tracked journalist who exposed Farage
Arron Banks did not deny setting investigators on the Sunday Times reporter who exposed Farage's hidden funding.
Private investigators hired by the Reform UK backer Arron Banks tracked the Sunday Times journalist who exposed Nigel Farage’s hidden funding, in an episode of Arron Banks journalist surveillance carried out on his instructions.
Banks did not deny commissioning the surveillance when the New Statesman put it to him. Asked directly whether he had paid investigators to look into Gabriel Pogrund, he replied: “When you live by the sword, you die by the sword.” The News Media Association has now called on him to “set out the extent” of his surveillance of journalists, warning that hiring private investigators to deter legitimate inquiries “is an attack on our democracy”.
Pogrund edits the Sunday Times Insight team. Earlier this year his reporters revealed that Farage had secretly received staff, security, drivers and accommodation from George Cottrell, a convicted money-launderer jailed in the United States in 2017, in the year before Farage’s election to Parliament. Cottrell paid three staff to run Farage’s social media and let him use a five-storey Georgian townhouse near Buckingham Palace. None of it was declared. The arrangements remain under police and parliamentary scrutiny.
It was that story Banks moved against. He instructed Precision Risk and Intelligence, a firm he once owned, to examine Pogrund, according to the New Statesman’s account. Banks told the magazine: “We believe the Sunday Times used hacked information and that was an area of interest. We do have an investigative arm that’s got advanced capabilities.” The Sunday Times rejected the claim outright, calling it “reprehensible” that Banks’s response to the reporting was to place a journalist under surveillance, and insisting the story “was not based on hacked information. It was based on responsible and professional journalism.”
Arron Banks journalist surveillance: a pattern, not an aberration This is not the first time Banks has turned investigators or lawyers on people scrutinising his money. During the Brexit referendum he ran what he called an “ex-MI5 and SAS” operation against Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott. A Labour MP later told the Commons that MI5 held evidence Banks had ordered surveillance of the then-Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, while she investigated Leave.EU’s data practices. And in 2023 the Court of Appeal awarded Banks £35,000 in a libel case against Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who had questioned his account of his Russian contacts, a case press-freedom campaigners regard as a textbook attempt to silence a reporter through the courts rather than answer her questions.
Reform UK says it had no knowledge of Banks’s alleged use of investigators against Pogrund. Banks remains a party member and one of Britain’s most prolific individual political donors, a status built on the £8m he poured into Leave.EU a decade ago. The distance Reform is placing between itself and its backer’s tactics does not extend to his money.
Index on Censorship’s Jemimah Steinfeld said she feared Pogrund would not be the only reporter targeted: “Gabriel is not the only one who’s asking the right questions about Reform… These tactics are often used to just stop the questions, to stop accountability.” The Sunday Times investigation that provoked Banks stays live, in Parliament and with the police. So does the question of who else asking about Reform’s money should expect a knock from Banks’s investigators rather than an answer.
