It took Nigel Farage over two weeks to finally respond to Nathan Gill’s conviction for eight counts of bribery for taking payments from a pro-Russian Ukrainian MP and close associate of one of Putin’s closest allies, Viktor Medvedchuk.

Speaking on the campaign trail in Caerphilly for a forthcoming Senedd byelection, Farage said he was “stunned” that his close associate had taken bribes: “I’m the only one [in Reform] that really knew him, going back a long way.”

Despite Farage’s concession, after multiple denials from Reform UK, that he was close to Gill, the admission only raises more questions.

Farage’s claim that he was the “only one” in Reform UK who knew Gill contradicts the information Byline Times has received from former MEPs that Gill and Tice worked closely together during the Brexit Party era.
[…]
Farage now admits he knows Gill well, but says he was “completely unaware” of his statements on Ukraine. But this new lack of awareness feels as flimsy as the first.

Here Farage is [pictured], in Gill’s office, with Oleh Voloshyn’s wife Nadia [Borodi], on the day Gill makes an intervention on behalf of Medvedchuk’s channels, with an employee of one of those channels, whose husband just started bribing Gill to make these statements six days earlier.

It strains credibility to believe that Farage did not ask who this woman was and – given the subsequent photograph in Gill’s office – was not aware of Nathan Gill’s statements in defence of her and her boss Medvedchuk’s TV stations in the EU Parliament that day.

Gill accepted payments for the next six months and became so close to Medvedchuk’s media empire he even joined its editorial board. Given his micromanaging of his MEPs and his closeness to Gill, how could Farage not have known this. And it beggars belief that he had no idea his his closest aide then hosted a roundtable with Medvedchuk ‘Putin’s Man in Ukraine’, in July 2019, to launch a peace plan which, which was so important Medvedchuk went to Moscow the next day to meet and get the endorsement of President Putin himself?