Who is Posh George? Nigel Farage’s right-hand man

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Harry Shukman

Reform UK is staffed by oddballs and enigmas, but none odder or more enigmatic than George Cottrell.

“Posh George”, as he is nicknamed, has been described as Nigel Farage’s “right-hand man”, an aristocratic private banker who works closely with the party leader. A recent article described the 31-year-old as “ever-present, well-connected and willing to spend large amounts of money”.

What exactly Cottrell does for the party is a mystery. “There is one rule: don’t ask what George does,” said a staffer quoted in The Spectator. Cottrell’s role is unofficial, reportedly connected to fundraising. His mother, who dated a young King Charles, is one of Reform’s biggest donors, and last year gave £500,000 to the party.

Despite Cottrell paying £15,000 to Farage to fund his trip to Palm Beach, Florida (where he met Elon Musk) the source of his own wealth remains unclear. He claims to be involved in private banking. Cottrell previously served eight months in an American prison for fraud — which is at odds with Farage’s statement that voters should choose Reform in the Runcorn by-election as the party offers “a lawmaker, not a lawbreaker”.

HOPE not hate has researched Cottrell’s history — and fact-checked some of the media interviews he has given — but the picture has only become murkier. Cottrell has appeared in the press to make unusual claims about the circumstances that led to his time in prison for fraud. A LinkedIn page in his name claims he worked for top private banks as a teenager. A former classmate even claimed he briefly served in the British Army. Our analysis has found that these claims do not stand up to scrutiny.

We investigated four details about Cottrell based on statements that he has made or details about him that his personal PR team and media law firm have not corrected. They raise further questions about who he is and his role at the heart of a party, which, some say, might win the next election.

Question 1: Did George Cottrell work for JP Morgan and Credit Suisse?

Media coverage of George Cottrell often cites his past as a banker before entering politics. A Mail on Sunday article, for instance, said he used to work for JP Morgan and Credit Suisse. This claim appears to come from a LinkedIn page in Cottrell’s name, now deleted, which cited a six-month stint consulting for Credit Suisse in Zurich, beginning in January 2013 — when Cottrell would have been 19 years old. His time at the Swiss bank apparently overlapped with a five-month period simultaneously working for JP Morgan in New York from February 2013. It is highly unusual, even unheard of, for anyone — especially a teenager — to work for rival banks at the same time (let alone for ones on different continents).

We asked both JP Morgan and Credit Suisse’s parent company (UBS) to check their records on Cottrell. Neither bank has a record of him working there.

On this, Cottrell’s representative said two things. The first was that he has never posted “any historic professional information” on LinkedIn. The second hinted that it was true anyway. In relation to his work for JP Morgan and Credit Suisse, Cottrell’s representative said: “The nature of his engagement is subject to obligations of confidence.”

Question 2: Was George Cottrell in the British Army?

Last October, Cottrell was profiled by Tatler, the high society magazine. The article quoted an old classmate from his boarding school who said that after being expelled for gambling, Cottrell joined the Army. “So he started the process of signing up as a squaddie, even doing several months of basic training,” the source said.

We asked the British Army if George Cottrell had ever served with them, providing his full name and date of birth. “There’s no trace of anyone with those details having served in the Army,” was the response.

Cottrell, through a representative, told us he never served but insisted that he did sign up after secondary school, started the induction, and withdrew.

Question 3: Why was George Cottrell arrested?

In 2017, after his release from a US prison for a wire fraud conviction, Cottrell gave an account to The Telegraph (and later Tatler) of what led to his arrest. He said his bank had been approached by two American businessmen who wanted to sell their property portfolio, and sprung on him over a boozy dinner in Las Vegas that they also wanted help laundering proceeds from drug money. Drunk, he gave them his advice and never spoke to them again. This was in 2014, before he began working for UKIP as their treasurer.

However, when Cottrell was under oath in a court in Arizona, he said something very different. Entering his guilty plea, Cottrell admitted to advertising money laundering services on the dark web. He was investigated by undercover agents at the Internal Revenue Service after they spotted a post in which he posted an offer online to launder ill-gotten money. According to the court documents, the undercover agents identified themselves as drug traffickers seeking to launder up to $150,000.

Ismael Nevarez, the former head of the IRS’s Arizona office that investigated Cottrell, said his claim to have been ignorant of who he was meeting “doesn’t hold water”. Speaking to HOPE not hate, he said: “No money launderer expects to meet a Good Samaritan in legitimate business. One of the requirements of the legal statute in the United States is you must give the money launderer a firm understanding that they are being asked to launder illegal proceeds.”

The recent Tatler profile wrote that Cottrell was “polite to a fault” to the supposed drug traffickers and that he merely “gave [the undercover agents] a few pointers”. The court documents, however, say Cottrell told the agents “to send $20,000 in purported drug proceeds to his associate in Colorado, who would convert the cash to Bitcoin and then transmit the proceeds to [Cottrell] to be laundered back to the agents”.

According to the 2017 Telegraph article, the young man heard “nothing” after the Las Vegas meeting. But IRS agents testified that Cottrell spoke to them on encrypted messaging platforms and “proposed a variety of methods he could use to disguise their drug profits, evade federal income taxes, and promote the continuation of their drug business”. He furthermore claimed to have contacts at banks to funnel drug money to off-shore accounts and disguise them as legitimate earnings.

The evidence that best contradicts Cottrell’s statements on his arrest are his own words, read out in court as his guilty plea in 2016. “I falsely claimed that I would launder the criminal proceeds through my bank accounts for a fee,” he declared. He even added: “Rather than launder any of the money, though… I intended to retain the money.” He testified that the scheme lasted March to September of 2014 — much longer than one drunken night in Las Vegas. Cottrell was charged with 21 counts and ultimately convicted on just one: wire fraud. He was in prison for eight months.

Through a representative, Cottrell insisted that nothing he told either The Telegraph or Tatler contradicted what he said in his guilty plea.

Question 4: What is the extent of George Cottrell’s gambling problem?

Cottrell has been candid in past interviews about his struggles with gambling. In 2017, he told a newspaper that he kicked his habit in prison. “I’ve battled a years-long multimillion dollar gambling addiction,” he similarly told a court in Arizona, adding that he had been disinherited by his family. His colleague, Arron Banks, now running as Reform’s West of England mayoral candidate, even wrote about Cottrell’s “gambling addiction” in his book, The Bad Boys of Brexit.

So it was with some surprise that last summer a story appeared in the Mail on Sunday that George Cottrell had been playing poker at a high-stakes game in Montenegro and had lost $20 million in one night. To Tatler, he claimed this figure, “with a hint of pride”, was in fact $53 million.

Cottrell’s representative did not address our questions about gambling in their letter to us.

Reform UK is pitching itself as the party of financial responsibility — its manifesto attacks “wasteful spending”. Is the presence of a self-confessed gambling addict seemingly capable of losing a fortune in a night of poker best placed to work on Reform’s finances and steer the party towards Downing Street?