Meet George | Posh George: The criminal behind Farage Ep.1

Friends, delegates and fellow Americans. Is July 2016? I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States. Donald Trump is on stage at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Together we will lead our party back to the White House. And listening in the crowd as a friend, Nigel Farage. And we will make America great again. The great disruptor of British politics. Like Trump, he's riding high. Farage has just pulled off the great cue of his career. Playing a pivotal, he would say, the decisive role in the greatest upset in recent political history. Brexit. Let June 23rd go down in our history as our Independence Day. And look who just joined us. The British politician Nigel Farage, the guy who is credited with having the UK exit the EU. No one can. The American TV networks all want a piece of Farage. I mean, one of the things that happened was that London, a professional political class, a living in London, kind of a must-touch. The next day Farage leaves Cleveland and gets the flight to Chicago on his way back to the UK. But as he steps off the plane, there are federal agents waiting with handcuffs. For a moment it looks like they're there for Farage himself. Until this step forwards to a resting member of his entourage. Someone who, just 24 hours earlier, was strolling around Cleveland with him. Without a care in the world. The man, with blond, slick back hair and a clean, shaven chubby face. Is 22-year-old George Swinfin, cultural. But to those who know him, he's just. Post George. A decade on from that arrest and time in a US prison. Post George is still the right-hand man. The most indispensable of all advisers. To Nigel Farage. The man desperate to hold the keys to number 10. I'm Gabriel Pogrand. I run the Insight Investigations Team at the Sunday Times. And together with my colleague, Finisha Mingus and Manu Mideilo. We spent the last few months trying to understand how a convicted broadster with their official role in reform UK has worked his way into the heart of British politics. Standing by the man who could win the next election. From the times and Sunday times, this is Post George, the criminal behind Farage. Episode 1, Meet George. So, before I became editor of Insight, the investigative unit here at the Sunday Times. I spent about a decade in and around Westminster as a political reporter. And it's funny, on reflection, the friendship between Farage and George Cottrell, Post George. Was one of those things I suppose Westminster just knew about. I think it was deemed to be old news. So self-evident, it didn't need to be set out loud. Farage was also someone who reveled in his status as a rule breaker. One of the bad boys of Brexit. So, maybe people seemed it was priced in. He had this friend 30 younger than him with a checkered past. Who cares? In the Insight team, we didn't see it that way. Hello, good morning, it is 8 o'clock. The headlines you're waking up to, it has been so far a successful night for a former UK. The party's gained more than 350 seats in the first result. You made this year reform made massive gains in the local elections. Now remember when my phone started buzzing? Who's a WhatsApp? He's here. Post George is literally in the reform spin room. The packed space within party headquarters, where MPs, officials and journalists would gather to watch results and analyze what they really meant. I asked a person, "Well, why?" For years, any time I'd asked anyone in reform or before that the Brexit party, anything about Post George, they told me he had no official party role. That was that. But now Farage and Cultural decide by side in reform HQ on a night of historic importance. 1200 or so seats counted out of the 5000 or so and there's a clear winner here they are, it's reform UK. Then my contact said something interesting. Some people have said a lot about Farage and Post George. Post George, they said, was just around. I guess he was. He is. Just there. There to pull Farage's chair back as he sits down. There to flick his lighter or fetch him a pint. In the room when history is made. And it goes deeper than that. Farage depends on George for, well, everything from the cigarettes he smokes to the planes he flies, to the videos he posts. It's a normal reform evening. I'm DJing tonight and it's yes, Nigel Barrages. Brexit, club classic. To yes, the money that has ultimately supported his life and operations. Much of this has never been disclosed to the public. In fact, let me correct that. Most of it hasn't. And this story, the journey we've been on, is about far more than rules and regulations of Westminster. It's about friendship and the loneliness of leadership. And yes, judgment. Because well away from Parliament, there's another world of criminals, crypto, of gambling. And which, through his relationship with Post George, Farage is far closer to than one might think. So how does a criminal become the guy for Nigel Farage? George Kotroll was born in Gloucester on the 13th of October 1993. A small cathedral city is surrounded by the west of England's rolling countryside. At the time John Major was Prime Minister. We can open Europe to all those nations right the way across Europe. The Cold War had ended. Take that top the charts. And in November that year, the Mastery retreat he came into force. The governments of the 12 reassembled here two months after the haggling of a summit, which finally produced the treaty now ready for signature. Creating the modern European Union. Yeah, Post George didn't grow up in a political family, nor by any stretch a normal one. His mother Fiona is an aristocrat, the daughter of the third Baron Minton, and British soldier, landlord and race course owner. The young RS grew up at the family's 8,000 acres seat in Houghton Hall, Yorkshire. And in her early 20s rebelled, not to the five becoming a model, but by posing naked for Pint House, the men's magazine, which crowned her pet of the month. This pays something of a problem when she began a courtship, with Prince Charles, the future king. The royals killed the match, and gossip column said she became estranged from her family for a time. There was some other unusual boyfriends. One was a writer arrested and convicted of heroin smuggling. Another was a wealthy Bob Sledder and Boat enthusiast two years her junior, whose name was Mark Swinfin-Cottrill. Cottrill senior used to fly George's mother Fiona around his hometown of Gloucester by helicopter. It was, he said, the best way of beating the traffic. The pair quickly became engaged. More than a decade later, on George's birth certificate, his parents bear complete the box marked occupation, with the same answer. It read, "Of independent means." This was the world George Cottrill has born into, of land, of inherited money, and of question marks. You see, in many ways, posh George is part of a generational story, of people who are part of the establishment, but also weirdly outside of it. At a tender age it seems, the family upsticks and move George and his older sister to must eat. A microscopic private island in the Caribbean, beloved of billionaires and royalty. Quite why and what George's parents actually did there is hard to pin down. But, according to his own since deleted CV, POS George spent time at a local primary school before being sent home. Just to the Elm School in Hartfordshire, which offers boarding to children from the age of seven, and then here. So I've just popped the car and just turned in the corner now. And what I'm actually actually is this most stunning school. And almost like a cathedral, Hogwarts and an Oxford College, rather than one. And this is Moulvin College. And it's a place which over the generations has produced some pretty remarkable alumni, Prime Ministers, Nobel laureates, Chronicles of Nine in the C.S. Lewis and POS George. I've just stopped by one of the entrances. Moulvin College is side of my left. There's little building in the background with these amazing turrets and gargoyles. Got a bird perch on top of one of the spires. So this is where POS George was at school, which he was teenage years. And pilot accounts, it's the place where he made quite the name for himself. George's fellow students remember him giving him the impression of having a lot of money. There are stories of him sitting at the back of the class, at least in three of the financial times. Curiously, he was more comfortable not in the company of English aristocrats, the school's traditional demographic of which he was part of. But the newer, flashier international money, two Nigerian borders were among his closest friends. Until that is, George left under a very dark cloud. Around the time of his 16th birthday, George was expelled after being involved in gambling while at school. One source told me it involved betting in Krueger Rand, gold billion coins from South Africa. It was the end of his journey through the educational establishment. Here was a teenager with no hope of university, had to vary sudden crossroads. So what did he do? Well, post George spent the next few years as far as we can figure out, getting his real education. After briefly toying with the idea of joining the army, he headed to Mayfa. In a heart of clubland, where English, Arab and Russian money mingles in private members clubs and hotel lobbies, post George swatted up. He became literate in international finance, private banking and offshore structures. Apparently spending time with a man called Scott Young, a property mogul and fixer for Russian on a yacht. Now, my colleague man who is in central London, he's just got off the cheaper green park station and is walking downpicked early on the opposite side to the Ritz. Before joining the Insight Investigations team, Manis spent half a decade covering property. So if you're trying to pin an asset to a person, he's your man. So just to know that this street in Mayfaer is off the beaten track, but it's actually quite busy. There's some workers, lots of cars, especially nice cars. There's a Porsche, there's a massive Bentley. I'm actually looking at a four story Georgian facade, quite imposing and looking slightly sinister. The shots are so closed. It doesn't look like anything is going on beyond the curtains. And the address might not mean anything to you right now. It's 44 Hartford Street, but it's here that Scott Young, the super fixer to the Russian oligarchs and his offices. And we understand post-George worked here too. Almost 10 years ago a website appeared, detailing George's life. It had no named author which I must say normally in journalism as a no for me. I obviously want to talk to people and verify things and get a feel for who they are before investigating their claims. This website, beyond George's now deleted LinkedIn, is literally the only piece of information that exists, purporting to provide any account of post-George's early career. And it's detailed. It contains dates and documents, some of which we've independently verified. And it has this nugget that post-George shared a building with the fixer for Russian oligarchs Scott Young. When I put this to someone who knows George well, they stopped. They said this was the one part of his career, his whole life, which George Hottroll refuses to talk about. And this source said they understood George and Young had worked alongside each other. On the website, it says Scott Young took post-George under his wing, giving him space on the same floor as his office. Then you could only get to, by the way, by passing metal detectors on the ground floor. They worked separately, but also together it says, Scott bringing post-George into a connecting wardrobe where cigarettes smoked lingered and deals were made. George Hottroll disputes that he worked with Scott Young at this address. Not long after, Young was jailed for contempt of court. In divorce proceedings, he had money from his wife in Monaco, the British Virgin Islands and Russia. "The judge has awarded you 20 million dollars." "Ah, but yeah, but can I just stop you there? It's called fraud and misrepresentation." You're listening to what you have Scott Young on the phone with his then wife, which was broadcast in a BBC documentary in 2018. "How where would this money be magick full?" "I will, I will get clashing on a couple of majors." During his time learning the rapes in the financial world, in George's words, he worked for private banks, investment managers and high net worth individuals. So when does he meet Nigel Farage? "Money's saying something, just say something." "I'm an insider of this with my colleagues on this investigation for Nisha Mingus and Manit Midele." "It is weird. I feel like we've spoken to a ridiculous number of people, none of whom can actually answer the question how they know each other. What do we actually think at the moment?" "Well, we've spoken to many sources and we know that George joined you Kip in 2010, which is the year he was expelled from school and he must have been 16 or 17. But, post-George didn't meet Nigel Farage until 2014 when he was 21. And how exactly they were first introduced were not sure. But one of the clearest and simplest explanations, in my opinion, is just that he was introduced through his aristocratic uncle, Lord Haskith. "Ah, Lord Haskith, we haven't mentioned him yet, but he's George's uncle through marriage. In the 70s he launched his own F1 team with his own money and even raced himself." "My name is Alexander Haskith and I'm a sponsor and instructor of the Haskith 308 Grand Pre-Tar." He was a formatory and he defected to UKip around the same time, so that seems like a clear cartway he could have got into Nigel's circle. "And that's actually what Aaron Banks, the insurance millionaire and former UKip donor, says in his book, his account of that whole time. He seems to infer that that's how post-George came to know Nigel Farage. It was all through his uncle." Which talismate what we found, which is basically that by 2015 they were good friends. "I think that's the most, that is the most efficient theory. And I guess they just seem to inhabit similar social worlds. Like, remember we found a copy of George Cottrell's deleted link, Din. In that, there's some references, lots of companies he's worked for. Some of them we think he probably never hung his hat out. But there was one maximum corporate finance that was run by Mert Hashers Army who many years later was the treasurer of reform. So I guess in that world of Westminster Mayfare, there just seems to have been a fair amount of overlap. I do wonder, you know, life being messy whether it's life. straightforward than them having had one moment where they looked into each other's eye. They might have just kind of entered each other's orbit in that kind of pre-Brexit moment. We don't really know. Do we? I mean. But what we do know is that by the beginning of 2015, posh George had been dispatched to Cambianne and MSX to support this UKIP MP candidate, Jamie Huntburn. Kind of remarkable how early on he had the trust of UKIP hierarchy. It was my point to the fact that it was a family connection. What do you actually feel is the light clear? I think the Angkor connection is possibly the most straightforward, just like Benesha was saying. Angkor introduces him to this circle, but the truth is we may know now, right? But we do know that by late 2015, just after David Cameron had called the EU referendum, Farage and Cultural do know each other. Age was 22, but George was appointed the Deputy Treasurer of the UK Independence Party or UKIP. You might sound surprised to hear of someone with that young even that job, but UKIP at that time were an upstart. A pretty ram shackle had times, candidly, on professional entity. It was an anti-immigration party with one clear aim. We want a trade deal with Europe. We want to be good neighbours with our European friends, but we desperately seek a referendum so that we can set this country free from political union. And it's leader, well, I think we know by now. We want our country back. Yeah, Nigel Farage. In 2016, Farage and post George were fully committed to Brexit campaign. Mainstream politicians from around the world were warning it could be a disaster. It's not fear I wish to promote, but truth, the economic development between our two countries. Because our focus is in negotiating with a big block of the European Union to get a trade agreement done. And UK is going to be in the back of the queue. On the night of the vote itself, it seems to be on a knife edge. Post George isn't concentrating on the results alone. Because he thinks he's about to make a killing. Within a few weeks, Hill of One everything lost it all and ended up behind bars. While making this podcast series, we approached both George Cultural and Nigel Farage. George Cultural says his supportive Mr Farage is the result of friendship and shared political ideology, not only hope or expectation of receiving anything in return. Nigel Farage described Mr Cultural as a longstanding friend, both deny any wrongdoing. You've been listening to Post George, the criminal behind Farage, with me Gabriel Pogrand, along with Venisha Mingus and Manu Mideo. The series is produced and exact by Will Rowan Kate Landbull. The assistant producer is Collette Fountain. Sound designed by Tiffany Dimack. Theme title and original music by Adam Forron. And the head of podcasts at the Times is Dan Bops. [Music]