Ex-Reform Wales leader Nathan Gill has been sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in prison for taking bribes as part of a pro-Russia influence campaign.
In September, Gill, pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery between 6 December 2018 and 18 July 2019. The former Reform Wales leader admitted taking bribes to make statements in favour of Russia while a Member of the European Parliament for UKIP and later the Brexit Party, when both were led by Nigel Farage.
READ NEXT: ‘Inconceivable’ that Nigel Farage was unaware of Nathan Gill’s pro-Russia statements
On Friday, the 52-year-old was sentenced by Judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb at the Old Bailey.
Gill was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for one count of bribery, and another five years on top of that on a separate count.
Because the sentences are concurrent, they do not add together for a total of length of more than a decade. The judge did say Gill would be eligible for release on licence after serving half of the total of 10-and-a-half years in prison.
Delivering the sentence, the judge said Gill abused a position of significant authority and trust” and had carried out “sophisticated offending.”
She said the harm inflicted by his actions had been “profound,” the BBC reports.
Gill, who was leader of UKIP in Wales from 2014 to 2016 and Reform UK Wales in 2021, accepted thousands of pounds to give TV interviews in favour of a key Putin ally and to make speeches in the European Parliament.
Gill was paid by a pro-Russian Ukrainian MP Oleg Voloshyn, who is a close associate of Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch whose daughter has Putin as her godfather.
One of Gill’s eight offences involved arranging a meeting with Medvedchuk, in which the Ukrainian presented his version of a peace plan for Ukraine to an audience of MEPs in Strasbourg in 2019.
The meeting was broadcast on Kremlin-controlled TV.
After Gill’s conviction, Farage came out and said he was “stunned” by Gill’s conviction, and claimed he was the “only one” in Reform who “really knew” him.