Britain’s MI5 security agency has repeatedly refused to investigate evidence that an alleged Russian spy tried to influence senior Tory politicians and channel illicit Russian funds into the party, a Tory member has claimed in a new complaint to the Investigative Tribunal (IPT). This is reported by The Guardian.

Sergei Christo, a member of the Conservative Party and former BBC World Service journalist, made the complaint to the tribunal after he corresponded with the chairman of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, Tory MP Julian Lewis, who allegedly recommended that he provide information about the authorities.

The panel’s 2020 report claimed that security services had turned a blind eye to “compelling evidence” of Russian interference, and Christo’s allegations provide potentially explosive new evidence to support its findings.

Labor MP Ben Bradshaw said “claims that the security services ignored evidence from a Tory whistleblower about Russian infiltration at the highest levels of the party are truly shocking” and argued that the “Tory Russia problem” was a threat to the British people . security

Christo, who was himself born in Russia, says he read a report on Russia that made him “suddenly realize” that maybe the story was more serious than he thought, and at Lewis’s suggestion, he wrote to Cressida Dick, the police commissioner at the time.

He received a reply from Counter-Terrorism Command (SO15) who said it was not a matter for the Metropolitan Police and advised him to refer it to the IPT, which oversees the security services, which he did.

Conservative Friends of Russia and diplomat Sergey Nalobin

The allegations center around the creation of a group called “Conservative Friends of Russia” in 2012 and its connection to Russian diplomat Sergei Nalobin.

In August of the same year, the Russian ambassador Oleksandr Yakovenko threw a lavish party to mark the opening of the group in the gardens of his residence in Kensington, among the guests were the former culture minister John Whittingdale, as well as Boris Johnson’s current wife Kerry. Symonds.

The Russian government is also said to have funded a trip to Moscow for a select group of members, including Vote Leave strategist Matthew Elliott.

Christo says his suspicions about Nalobin, who was the first political secretary of the Russian embassy, ​​were awakened two years ago when a diplomat approached him and they met at the Carlton Club.

When Nalobin found out that Christo was working as a volunteer at the Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) Ministry of Finance, he said he could “introduce Russian companies that will donate money to the Conservative Party”.

“I knew immediately that what he proposed was illegal,” Christo wrote in a letter to Lewis last year.

Alarmed by Nalobin’s efforts and the embassy’s sponsorship of the group, Christo contacted the Guardian’s Luke Harding and revealed Nalobin’s past and his troubling relationship with the group.

Harding and journalists from Russia’s The Insider discovered that Nalobin had family ties to FSB intelligence: his father, Mykola, was a KGB general whose duties included surveillance of Oleksandr Litvinenko, and his brother Viktor also worked for the FSB.

The published articles led to the resignation of the honorary chairman of the Conservative Friends of Russia, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, and the group’s name change.

What Christo has never revealed before is his failed attempts to get the security services to act.

He says he only contacted the Guardian after his efforts to get the authorities to act failed.

In 2011, he repeatedly tried to sound the alarm at MI5.

After the first meeting with the agent went nowhere, he wrote to the Director General of MI5, which led to a further meeting with the two agents in a government building in Whitehall.

The group “Conservative Friends of Russia” was renamed the “Westminster Russian Forum” and was finally closed only last year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, Nalobin continued to maintain close relations with MPs and activists of the Conservative Party for another three years, until the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to extend his visa.