Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum

Based on Wikipedia: Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum

In November 2015, two British businessmen sat down for lunch at the Russian ambassador's residence in London. Their official explanation for the meeting? They wanted to discuss finding a buyer for a banana plantation in Belize. What actually happened at that lunch—and in the months that followed—would become one of the most scrutinized and controversial questions in modern British political history.

The question of whether Russia interfered in Britain's 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union remains, officially, unproven. But the trail of evidence, investigations, and admitted connections paints a picture that refuses to go away. Multiple parliamentary committees, the Electoral Commission, and even the United States Senate have dug into the matter. What they found was less a smoking gun than a fog of suspicious meetings, undisclosed donations, and social media manipulation on an industrial scale.

The Cast of Characters

To understand this story, you need to know the players.

Arron Banks was a British insurance businessman who became the largest single donor to the campaign for leaving the European Union. His company, Leave.EU, operated alongside the official Vote Leave campaign but with a brasher, more populist style. Banks would eventually pump more than eight million pounds into the Brexit effort—money whose origins would later become the subject of a criminal investigation.

Andy Wigmore was Banks's close associate and a political activist who served as Leave.EU's communications director. He had a talent for networking and, as it turned out, for making connections with Russian officials.

Then there was Alexander Yakovenko, Russia's ambassador to the United Kingdom. Ambassadors meet with all sorts of people—that's their job. But the frequency and nature of his meetings with the Leave.EU team would raise eyebrows.

And lurking in the background was Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm that would later become infamous for its role in harvesting Facebook users' personal information. The company's vice president was Steve Bannon, the American media executive who would go on to become chief strategist in Donald Trump's White House. Cambridge Analytica's involvement in both the Brexit campaign and the 2016 American presidential election would eventually draw the attention of investigators on both sides of the Atlantic.

A Timeline of Troubling Connections

The connections between Brexit campaigners and Russian interests began emerging in autumn 2015, just as the Leave campaign was gathering momentum.

In late September 2015, Wigmore attended the annual conference of the United Kingdom Independence Party at the Doncaster Racecourse. There, he met Alexander Udod, a Russian diplomat. What made this meeting significant only became clear three years later: Udod was expelled from Britain in 2018 as a suspected Russian intelligence officer, part of the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats following the nerve agent poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury.

Udod apparently saw potential in Wigmore. Within weeks, he had arranged for Wigmore and Banks to have lunch with Ambassador Yakovenko himself. That November meeting—the one officially about banana plantations in Belize—marked the beginning of a relationship that would continue throughout the referendum campaign and beyond.

The same month, Banks sent an email to Steve Bannon and others requesting help from Cambridge Analytica with fundraising in the United States for Leave.EU. This request was legally problematic from the start: foreign contributions to British political campaigns are illegal. Banks would later come under criminal investigation partly over questions about Leave.EU's funding sources.

On November 17, 2015, Wigmore, Banks, and Cambridge Analytica executive Brittany Kaiser officially launched the Leave.EU campaign. According to reporting by The Guardian, Ambassador Yakovenko introduced Wigmore and Banks to a Russian oligarch named Siman Povarenkin. Documents related to that meeting suggested Banks was offered business deals.

The Money Question

Here's where the story gets particularly murky.

Banks was the Brexit campaign's biggest financial backer. But where did his money actually come from? Before the donations began flowing, his insurance underwriting company, Southern Rock, was technically insolvent. It needed sixty million pounds to meet regulatory requirements. Then, in September 2015—just as Banks was ramping up his Brexit involvement—another company called ICS Risk Solutions injected seventy-seven million pounds into Southern Rock.

When a Member of Parliament questioned Banks about this convenient timing, he implied he was simply moving money between two companies he owned. But investigative journalists at openDemocracy found something odd in the corporate filings. While Banks claimed to own ninety percent of ICS Risk Solutions, documents from a subsidiary suggested he actually owned somewhere between fifty and seventy-five percent. If true, this would mean there was an undisclosed shareholder—someone whose identity has never been revealed.

In November 2018, the National Crime Agency opened a criminal investigation into Banks following a referral from the Electoral Commission. The commission's conclusion was blunt: they had "reasonable grounds to suspect that Mr. Banks was not the true source of the eight million pounds reported as loans." They believed Banks had facilitated a loan from a company called Rock Holdings to his Leave.EU campaign. The problem? Rock Holdings is based on the Isle of Man.

The Isle of Man occupies a peculiar position in British geography and law. It's a possession of the British Crown, but it's not actually part of the United Kingdom. This distinction matters enormously for campaign finance law: companies based there are legally barred from funding British political campaigns. If the Electoral Commission's suspicions were correct, it would mean the Brexit campaign's largest donor was channeling foreign money.

The Social Media Battlefield

While investigators followed the money trail, a different kind of influence operation was playing out online.

Russia's information warfare capabilities had been honed over years of practice. The Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization sometimes called a "troll farm," employed hundreds of people to create fake social media accounts and flood platforms with content designed to inflame divisions in Western societies. They had already been caught interfering in the 2016 American presidential election. The question was whether they had done the same in Britain.

In 2018, Twitter released data identifying 3,841 accounts of Russian origin affiliated with the Internet Research Agency. These accounts had collectively sent over ten million tweets in what The Telegraph described as "an effort to spread disinformation and discord." On the day of the Brexit referendum itself, there was what one report called a "day-long blitz" of activity.

The numbers were staggering. Researchers from Swansea University and the University of California at Berkeley identified around 150,000 accounts with links to Russia that tweeted about Brexit in the run-up to the referendum. A separate study at City, University of London documented a network of nearly 795,000 accounts that tweeted about the referendum. Of the roughly 482,000 accounts whose location could be determined, only about 30,000 were actually based in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 accounts had been deactivated, removed, blocked, set to private, or had their usernames altered after the vote—a pattern consistent with accounts being deleted to cover their tracks.

One particularly revealing study looked at 1.5 million tweets containing hashtags related to the referendum. It found that almost a third of all those tweets had been generated by just one percent of the accounts. Both pro-Leave and pro-Remain bots existed, but the researchers noted that "the family of hashtags associated with the argument for leaving the EU dominates," with pro-Leave bots tweeting more than three times as often as their pro-Remain counterparts.

A working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research attempted to quantify the impact. Their rough calculation suggested that automated accounts may have been responsible for around 1.76 percentage points of the Leave vote share. Given that Leave won by a margin of 3.78 percentage points, this estimate—if accurate—would suggest that Russian bots could have been decisive.

State Media and the Propaganda Machine

Social media bots weren't Russia's only tool. The country also deployed its state-sponsored media outlets, primarily RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and Sputnik.

A United States Senate report found that RT covered the Brexit referendum campaign extensively and offered "systematically one-sided coverage." A parliamentary inquiry into disinformation cited research estimating the value of anti-EU Russian state media during the campaign at between 1.4 and 4.14 million pounds. This wasn't advertising in the traditional sense—it was the propaganda value of having a slick, professional-looking news channel consistently pushing narratives favorable to Leave.

Prime Minister Theresa May eventually accused the Russian government directly of "deploying its state-run media organisations to plant fake stories and photo-shopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions."

The Investigations That Weren't

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this story is what didn't happen: a thorough, definitive investigation by the British government.

In October 2019, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament completed a report on allegations of Russian interference in the referendum. They passed it to Downing Street on October 17. Then, nothing. The government refused to publish it before the December 2019 general election, despite the obvious relevance to voters.

When the report finally appeared in July 2020, it was notably silent on Brexit specifically. The committee hadn't investigated Russian interference in the referendum—not because they found no evidence to investigate, but because no one had asked them to. The report did, however, reach two significant conclusions. First, it found that Russian interference in British politics is "commonplace." Second, it documented substantial evidence of interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, suggesting that targeting British democratic processes was an established Russian practice.

The report's authors were scathing about the government's lack of curiosity. They found that no assessment had been made of Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, despite obvious reasons for concern. It was, in effect, a deliberate decision not to look too closely.

The Journalist Who Followed the Trail

British journalist Isabel Oakeshott spent months investigating the connections between the Leave campaign and Russia. Her conclusion, published in The Times, was damning:

The relationship began in autumn 2015, when Banks was gearing up for the Brexit campaign, and continued throughout the referendum and beyond. The Kremlin was simply doing what it does so well: identifying individuals who might be useful to President Vladimir Putin's geopolitical aims and seeing what might come of it. In Banks and Wigmore it literally struck gold. In due course, Banks would become the single biggest donor to the Brexit campaign, putting him at the heart of British politics.

Oakeshott's assessment was that Banks and Wigmore genuinely shared some of Putin's political views—Banks, after all, is married to a Russian. But she also believed they were "shamelessly used by the Russians," whether they fully understood it or not.

The American Connection

The Brexit story cannot be fully separated from events across the Atlantic.

In July 2014—two years before the referendum—a lawyer with the American firm Bracewell & Giuliani advised the principals behind Cambridge Analytica about the legal risks of foreign nationals being involved in American elections. Alexander Nix, the company's British chief executive, was told to recuse himself from any involvement with American election work because he wasn't a U.S. citizen. This advice would prove prophetic.

The same networks that connected Cambridge Analytica to Leave.EU also connected them to the Trump campaign. Brittany Kaiser, the Cambridge Analytica executive who helped launch Leave.EU, was eventually subpoenaed by Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election. She became the first person with links to both Brexit and the Trump campaign known to have been questioned by Mueller.

The personnel overlaps were striking. Steve Bannon was involved with both Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign. Nigel Farage, the face of Brexit, was photographed visiting Trump Tower and later visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Banks, Farage, and Wigmore all had multiple contacts with Trump's inner circle.

In December 2017, three members of the U.S. Congress wrote to the Director of National Intelligence requesting information on Russian interference in the Brexit vote. A Senate minority report the following month stated that "the Russian government has sought to influence democracy in the United Kingdom through disinformation, cyber hacking, and corruption."

What We Know, What We Don't

Here's the honest summary of where things stand.

We know that leading figures in the Leave.EU campaign had multiple meetings with Russian officials, including at least one later expelled as a suspected intelligence officer. We know they were offered business opportunities. We know that the campaign's funding sources remain murky, with the Electoral Commission and National Crime Agency both raising serious questions about whether the money came from legitimate sources.

We know that Russian social media operations targeted the British electorate with a volume and sophistication that may have moved the needle. We know that Russian state media pushed relentlessly pro-Leave coverage. We know that the same data analytics firm involved in Leave.EU was also involved in the Trump campaign, which has been definitively shown to have benefited from Russian interference.

What we don't know—and may never know—is whether any of this was coordinated. Were the meetings with Russian officials innocent networking, as the participants claim? Was the mysterious money simply Banks shuffling his own assets between companies? Did the social media bots emerge organically from Russia's general desire to sow Western discord, or were they part of a specific plan to influence the referendum?

The British government chose not to investigate these questions rigorously. Multiple parliamentary committees have nibbled at the edges. The Electoral Commission referred concerns to the National Crime Agency. But no definitive investigation, with full access to intelligence materials, has ever produced a comprehensive answer.

Why It Matters

Britain left the European Union on January 31, 2020. The referendum result—52 percent Leave to 48 percent Remain—has reshaped British politics, economics, and international relations in ways that will play out for decades.

If Russian interference tipped the balance, it would represent one of the most successful intelligence operations in modern history. For a relatively modest investment in social media trolls and cultivating relationships with a few key figures, Russia would have achieved a strategic goal it could never have accomplished through conventional means: weakening the Western alliance by pulling Britain out of the European Union.

Even if the interference didn't change the outcome—even if Leave would have won anyway—the questions themselves have damaged British democracy. They have left millions of people wondering whether the most consequential vote in a generation was conducted fairly. They have provided ammunition for those who want to delegitimize the result and those who want to dismiss all concerns as conspiracy theories.

In January 2023, the European Court of Human Rights asked the British government to respond to allegations of Russian interference. The case had been rejected by British courts, but European judges decided the questions deserved answers. As of this writing, Britain is still required to explain what it knew and what it did about possible foreign interference in its democracy.

The banana plantation, apparently, was never sold.