Nigel Farage’s gold and crypto side-hustles | If You're Listening | ABC NEWS In-depth

If you've ever been in the market for gold, you might have come across this ad featuring Nigel Farage.Until pretty recently, the British MP was making these pretty generic ads for a gold bullion company, promoting the benefits of investing in gold.

The government takes more of your money.Gold is how you protect yourself.

Now, vague statements like that one are hard to interrogate, but the numbers behind the statements aren't.Which is why I'm particularly interested in one ad that Farage did where he included a few charts.

Are you worried about the value of your money and its purchasing power?Well, you should be.Because over the last 20 years, every pound now buys half a pound.of what it did.

Okay, pause it right there.That chart is showing the decreasing value of one pound from 2004 to 2024 and it's accurate enough.The nature of inflation is that if you bury a pound in your backyard for 20 years it will not be able to buy as much stuff when you dig it up as it could when you buried it as Farage correctly identifies here.

Inflation is constantly eating away at at your money.

But the reason this ad is so interesting to me is because he then goes on to show a second chart.

Now I spent 20 years in the metals business before getting involved in politics and one commodity I've always liked is gold and over the last 20 years whilst your money in the bank has been depreciating The price of gold has been incredible.It's produced amazing returns over 20 years.OK, pause it there.

Now, while the previous chart showed a line going down, this one pretty clearly shows a line going up.That's good, right?Gold must be a great investment.

But when you put these charts together, what do you get?

is actually extremely misleading.He's saying that inflation means your money is worth less.But also, look, gold is worth much more money than it was before.Do you think that inflation might have something to do with that, Nigel?Let's pull Nigel's data onto one of our own charts.What he's showing is the nominal gold price.

How much is gold worth at any one time in pounds.But, as he says, pounds become less valuable over time.So if you apply inflation to the equation, the picture is much less rosy.Farage must know this.

After all, he spent 20 years in the metals business.

Now, I'm not here to say that Farage is wrong and that gold is a terrible investment.Between 2004 and 2011, gold was genuinely a good investment as the global financial crisis drove people out of stocks and into more stable investments like gold.But then its value went flat for a decade.Stocks, however, tend to recover quickly.So a guy who put the same amount of money into stocks in 2004 would overtake your gold investment at around 2018.Here's the thing about gold.

When you look at the market, you'll see it really only performs well during a crisis.World Wars, the global financial crisis.Otherwise, stocks, bonds or property are generally a better investment.Which means if you want people to buy gold, you really have to convince them that a catastrophe is imminent.

And so...The country is now in deeper debt than it has ever, ever been.The global situation is the most perilous it's been in my lifetime.We've got a war going on.in Ukraine, a war going on in the Middle East, and who knows what China's intentions on Taiwan might be.So these are deeply worrying, very, very unstable times.

Now, admittedly, this scheme has paid dividends for at least one person.Nigel Farage.Since the start of 2024, he's been paid about £700 ,000 to do these ads for Direct Bullion London.And his hustles aren't limited to selling gold.He's also been given millions of pounds by cryptocurrency guys.It's one of the reasons he was forced to resign his seat in Parliament and hold a by -election.

He wants a mandate from the public to ignore questions about all that money he's been getting.There's a pattern here, though, and it runs through some of the strangest people in British politics.A fixer who advertised money laundering on the dark web.A donor whose diamond mines didn't exist.To understand why they're all circling Nigel Farage, you have to follow the money backwards.So let's do that together.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.This whole story plays out a little bit like a Guy Ritchie movie.It's high on rapscallions and hijinks.So let's start with the crew assembly phase of the movie.

That's not worth a bet, I don't know what is.

First, we're going to meet Farage's fixer, George Cottrell, who apparently goes by Posh George.Cue the music.Here's how Nigel Farage described Posh George in an interview with the Trigonometry podcast.girlfriends he's had and the things he's done and all of it.Posh George is from an aristocratic family.His uncle is a lord who owned a Formula One team.

Hesketh's his uncle, a Formula One and mum dated.the man that's now the king.

Oh yes and his mother Fiona is an ex -girlfriend of King Charles.

So of course there are great reasons why he's a person of interest.

He was introduced to Farage by his uncle Lord Hesketh sometime around 2013 or 14 when he was just 20 years old and Farage's star was on the rise.

Nigel Farage is calling it a political earthquake.His United Kingdom Independence Party or UKIP won 27 % of the vote.more than Labor or the Conservatives.

The People's Army of UKIP have spoken tonight and delivered just about the most extraordinary result that has been seen in British politics for 100 years.

Initially, Posh George was a volunteer fundraiser, but he was also doing a bit of fundraising for himself on the side.He'd started advertising a service he could provide on the dark web.The service was money laundering.In March 2014 he was contacted by a potential client.He flew to the US the following month to meet up.Initially George was hesitant to travel to the US for the purposes of doing crime but his contacts had suggested meeting up in Las Vegas and as a gambling addict he couldn't resist.

In Vegas he met up with two businessmen and they went to dinner at a Michelin starred restaurant.At the restaurant, the men told him that they make $2 .5 million a year trafficking cocaine from Phoenix to New York.Then, posh George returned to London.What happened next is a bit murky.There's some conflicting accounts, which I'll get to in just a second.But back in the UK, he started rapidly getting closer and closer to Farage.

Time and again during the referendum contest, he was Nigel Farage's right hand man, passing him the mic, telling him what next.

He was with Farage all the way through the Brexit referendum.

This will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people.

After the referendum, Farage announced he was intending to travel to the United States to campaign for Donald Trump.

You're going to be going to the Republican National Convention next week.

This is going to be one heck of an election here.Well, I think there's one big message that I'm going to bring to Cleveland next week.

Posh George, as Farage's right hand man, went too.But on the way through Chicago airport, George was taken aside for a bit of a chat with the authorities.They let him continue through to Cleveland for the convention.George told his colleagues that he was carrying a large amount of cigarettes on him and that's why he was questioned.But a few days later, he was arrested.

He's been charged with conspiracy to launder drugs money and faces years in prison if found guilty.

Those drug dealers he met in Las Vegas, it turns out that they were federal agents conducting a sting operation on him.

He's now accused on 21 counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering, money laundering itself, wire fraud, and even blackmail against the undercover FBI men who mounted the sting.

According to the indictment, George had continued corresponding with the agents after returning to London.and eventually threatened to report them to authorities if they didn't pay him a ransom of 130 Bitcoin.At the time, that amount of Bitcoin was worth about $80 ,000.It would be worth about $11 .5 million now.Posh George didn't get his bitcoin.See federal agents are tricky to blackmail with threats of reporting them to themselves.

George ended up pleading guilty to wire fraud and spent eight months in a maximum security prison.He later told the Telegraph that his time in British boarding schools prepared him well for a stint in an American maximum security jail.But In that same interview with the Telegraph he basically put the whole thing down to just a misunderstanding and that's that's what Farage says about it too.George as a young man got into trouble in America.

If you are involved in tax avoidance schemes it is very easy in America to get into very very big trouble.

To be clear in his plea bargain submitted under oath Posh George says that he advertised money laundering services on the dark web and was planning to divert criminal proceeds into his own accounts and keep them.Basically, to rob the drug dealers.Which, I mean, doesn't sound like tax avoidance to me, but what do I know?Alright, so Posh George is our fixer.Now we're going to meet the money man, a guy aptly named Aaron Banks.

I'm a self -made person.I make my money from a desk and two telephones.So I resent your kind of comment that I'm some sort of rich Tory.

Aaron Banks had previously been a big donor to the Conservative Party.But in 2014 he made a big splash when he suddenly made a million pound donation to Farage's UKIP.Well someone has to fund us.We have to have money.At the time, most people had no idea who this guy was and were sceptical about how he was able to make such a, by British standards, massive political donation.

It seems like you've got about 30 businesses involved in diamond mining, insurance, banking,

it's clear that our money man had money.What wasn't clear was where exactly that money was coming from.See, when journalists at the time went poking around to try and figure out how he was able to give so much money to Nigel Farage, they found mysterious things.For example, Banks told Channel 4 that a chunk of his money was coming from South African diamond mines.

Diamond mines?Diamond mines, yes.In Kimberley.It's the old De Beers Kimberley mine.And you own it?Yeah, we own seven mines there.

Not all of them, but there's quite a cluster.What's that take?Quite a lot.We pulled out a 12 -carat diamond last week.

But when they sent a reporter to South Africa to check out the mines for themselves, They weren't operating.And he has said that the diamond industry is the most fun he's ever had in business.

It is admittedly after office hours, but if there is fun to be had here, it isn't obvious how.

The BBC, meanwhile, had a look at his Gibraltar -based auto insurance business and found that it pays out almost three times as much in claim settlements as it takes in as a premium.

For Southern Rock, they pay out £2 .86 for every £1 of income that they generate.

So for every pound they get in, they're paying £2 .86 out.The Guardian found that his other insurance businesses were also barely breaking even.Between 2014 and 2016, Banks gave Farage £450 ,000 in personal gifts and became the biggest political donor in British history.dumping a total of eight million pounds into UKIP and the campaign to leave the EU in the Brexit referendum.Subsequent reporting by Bloomberg News calculated that Banks' donations were equivalent to about a quarter of his known assets.So he gave away a quarter of his money in political donations.

Given the confusing nature of his business interests, and the fact that he'd taken several meetings during the Brexit campaign with various Russians, Rumours started flying.

For months there has been speculation Mr Banks was being funded from sources in Russia.

A criminal investigation began.

The UK's top organised crime agency is investigating the true origins of Aaron Banks' huge political donations.

But he was cleared of any wrongdoing.Bloomberg found that it was more likely that the donations had been funded by lending money from his own insurance companies, which apparently is totally legal.Banks then launched a big defamation case, which essentially stopped any more journos from poking around.Including us.No more poking.We promise.

So that's Nigel Farage's Brexit -era inner circle.A money man whose fortune nobody could quite explain, and a fixer who ended up in the custody of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons.Despite all the investigations and jail time, both Aaron Banks and Posh George are still in the picture, still in Farage's inner circle.Banks is now a key figure in Farage's current party, Reform UK, and stood as a candidate for the party in a mayoral election last year.Meanwhile, Posh George reportedly has spent significant sums of money paying for Farage's private security detail and considers him a father figure.Speaking to the Trigonometry podcast, Farage has sought to downplay the importance of his friend's criminal past.

So he has a conviction.Maybe that conviction will be pardoned one day.I don't know.I've stood loyally with George because I think he deserves a second chance.

And what has posh George been doing with his second chance?Well he's been living in Montenegro writing a book called How to Launder Money and getting into cryptocurrency.Back in 2020 he and Farage had lunch with crypto billionaire Christopher Harbourn who is the part owner of the cryptocurrency Tether.Days later, Posh George was part of the team launching a new gambling platform using Harbourn's cryptocurrency.

anytime, anywhere, on every sport.

Harborne subsequently became Farage's new biggest financial backer, donating 25 million pounds to Reform UK over the last seven years, and providing Farage with a 5 million pound personal gift in 2024.Which is perhaps why Farage is now not only spruiking the benefits of investing in gold, but cryptocurrency too.

I was advocating in 2020 that people should have crypto and a bit of Bitcoin as part of their portfolio.Bring crypto and digital assets in from the cold.

Farage has even been specifically talking up the company belonging to his biggest donor.

Tether is about to be valued as a $500 billion company.You know, stable coins, crypto, this world is enormous.And I've been urging for years that London should embrace it.

There's something odd going on here.Cryptocurrency, online gambling, that thing with the Direct Bullion London gold company.

All of these things have been circling Farage for years now.They're circling Donald Trump as well.

A few weeks ago we did an episode about how various crypto bros pick up artists andright -wing podcasters have been helping the Trump family get rich through cryptocurrency.In fact, the entire anti -establishment right -wing political ecosphere is getting into both gold and crypto.in a big way.

with ownership of physical gold bars.

The thing is, gold and crypto are kind of polar opposites to each other.Gold is considered a very stable, boring, safe thing to invest in, whereas crypto is obviously incredibly volatile.

They sold that meme coin, which netted a huge amount of money for them, but left about a million investors, I think about $3 billion in the hole.

But the overlap is that both of them are attractive to people who think the traditional established financial and political system is on the verge of collapsing.They don't trust the government.They don't trust the banks.And they don't trust the global elite.

From personal experience, I don't particularly trust the banks.

I think a lot of the people that are elites aren't elite.I think the people that aren't elite are elite.So we're going to have to maybe switch that around somehow.

The thing is...If you draw a Venn diagram with one circle being guys who don't trust the banks or the government, another being guys who might want to put their savings into gold or crypto, and guys who would like to vote for Nigel Farage or Donald Trump, you basically have a single large circle.Trump and Farage are two of the most influential people in the West.world and they're using that influence to promote the idea that the Western world is falling apart and you need to put your money in non -traditional assets like crypto and gold.A lot of journalists, citizens and regulators are spending a lot of time trying to find reasons why any of this is breaching any kind of rules.

For now it seems that it's all above board.I'm not all that interested in the rules of the situation.What I'm interested in is simpler.We are used to politicians being funded by establishment companies, finance, mining, manufacturing, defence.But clearly that has all changed.We now have some of the most powerful politicians on earth whose careers are funded by very strange people who profit from instability, who profit from fear.

And that is, I mean, it's definitely different.