On 1 March 2017, a 23-year-old Englishman appeared before a judge in Phoenix, Arizona, to be sentenced. He wore an orange jumpsuit and was escorted by armed guards. The charges were serious: aged just 20, George Cottrell had offered to participate in a scheme to launder millions of dollars from drug trafficking. But the drug traffickers were law-enforcement agents, and Cottrell was indicted on 21 counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering, mail fraud, wire fraud, blackmail and interstate communication with intent to extort. Having submitted a plea agreement – in which he admitted: “I falsely claimed that I would launder the criminal proceeds… I intended to retain the money” – he escaped all but one of the charges (wire fraud).
In sentencing, the judge noted that Cottrell’s plan had been sophisticated and “very dangerous”, but noted also his youth. “This does not need to define you”, she concluded. “And so it’s up to you to go forward from here.” By the summer, Cottrell was back in London, where he was photographed outside a pub with his very close friend Nigel Farage.
Cottrell’s relationship with the Reform leader is now the subject not only of media scrutiny but also a police investigation into the £500,000 given to the party by Cottrell’s aristocratic mother, Fiona. Lady Cottrell is also reported to have donated £1m to a Reform fundraising organisation (a gift that is being looked into by the National Crime Agency). These transactions have added to the questions being asked over Farage’s personal finances following his failure to register a gift of £5m from Christopher Harborne, a secretive billionaire who lives in Thailand under the name Chakrit Sakunkrit (which was being investigated by the parliamentary standards commissioner until Farage resigned as an MP). It is, at this point, not exactly helpful to Farage that Cottrell – who is also reported to have given the Reform leader undeclared benefits in the form of accommodation and staffing – has literally published a book emblazoned with the words How to Launder Money.
In terms of inadvisable publishing stunts, this is surely up there with Richard Nixon’s How to Conceal a Microphone in Your Opponent’s Office, or Robert Maxwell’s Creative Uses for Your Employees’ Pensions (both sadly unpublished, and indeed unwritten). It also really doesn’t help that How to Launder Money contains so many references to financial products that Farage himself has promoted. For example, since becoming an MP in 2024 Farage has been paid £685,500 to work as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion dealer. No wrongdoing is implied, though a voter’s view of this activity might not be improved by the knowledge that Farage’s right-hand man has included a whole chapter titled: “Gold Is the Gold Standard in Money Laundering”.
Farage’s outside earnings also include more than £57,000 from three companies related to cryptocurrency (crypto is also the source of much of Christopher Harborne’s wealth). A now-deleted policy plan on Reform’s website promised to “make the United Kingdom the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency”. And so, again, it doesn’t exactly polish these facts that Cottrell’s book sets out to answer the question, “Why is crypto so good for laundering money?” – and in doing so provides a list of tips to anyone who wants to do exactly that.
Most embarrassing of all is the chapter called “The Art of the Bribe”, which details how money can be quietly donated to a politician without being declared. Farage is reported to have used a property owned by Cottrell, who also provided him with staff, without registering these benefits (Farage has denied any wrongdoing). It doesn’t help that Cottrell’s book recommends “paying some of the target’s expenses” as a method of bribery. It also recommends paying inflated speaking fees as a means of transferring funds to a politician. Parliament’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests details hefty speaking fees paid to MPs from all parties, including Reform – often paid by companies that would not be permitted to donate because they’re not British.
As confessional literature goes, it’s not exactly St Augustine or Rousseau. The book is padded out with long sections on the history of money (including discussions of “fiat money” and the gold standard that reflect the economic ideas of the online right) and technical descriptions of previous cases, which read as if they are the work of the book’s co-author, the financial investigator Lawrence Burke Files. Here and there, a line jumps out – “Cocaine is good stuff when you first start” or “A local art dealer can serve as a gateway for party drugs and escorts” – that sound much more like the work of a dishevelled aristocrat. There are glimpses of what this book could have told us about the dismantling of our high streets – “From research, we have learned it typically takes three nail salons to launder the money from a brothel” – but that would have taken an author who cared about such things. Instead, Cottrell’s argument is that “making money laundering a crime does not prevent the actual crime [my emphasis] from happening”. Such a sentence could be read as suggesting that money laundering isn’t really a crime at all.
For all that, How to Launder Money – whose subtitle bills the book as a “guide for law enforcement, prosecutors and policymakers” – does convey a warning. Several chapters document the financial structures set up to move money on behalf of the wealthy (as with successful investing, the secret is to be rich already). Russian and Azerbaijani “laundromats” of shell companies are described in glowing terms. The Danske Bank “mirror trades” – in which billions of dollars were funnelled out of Russia by respectable Western institutions – are described, approvingly, as “brilliant”. In all of these stories there is a theme: the movement of money from autocracies to democracies. Power makes its money where it is unconstrained, then moves it somewhere nice and stable.
Perhaps the consequences of this are hard to understand for someone like George Cottrell, whose mother was a girlfriend of the future King, who went to primary school on the Caribbean island of Mustique before being sent to Malvern College, a very expensive boarding school from which he was expelled for gambling with solid gold coins. In court in the US, Cottrell said his gambling addiction had cost him millions, but there is also clearly an upside to being an aristocrat with a very high appetite for risk.
That seems the best explanation for why Cottrell co-wrote this book, which is now so embarrassing to Farage, his friend and mentor. Clearly, Cottrell is not someone who needs the money from selling a few books. This seems more the act of someone who lacks impulse control. When the book was published in February, Cottrell held a launch party at a hotel on Whitehall. Richard Tice, Nick Candy, Laila Cunningham and other senior Reform figures attended. Within spitting distance of Downing Street, they raised their glasses to this book and laughed at what is possible. To quote a well known line from the film The Big Short (2015): they’re not confessing. They’re bragging.
How to Launder Money: A Guide for Law Enforcement, Prosecutors and Policymakers
George Cottrell and Lawrence Burke Files
Biteback, 400pp, £25
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[Further reading: Meet the people who handle the King’s billions]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentSadly trying to make the pay for play schemes and corruption hang on Farage. No less than our haloed Barrack Hussein Obama whose only resume features prior to POTUS were community organizer and six months US Senator magically came to own a thousand feet of ocean frontage estates in Martha Vineyard and Hawaii with a mansion in DC. Writing books.
It’s time Britain and other Western countries clean up the corruption and quit ridiculously publicly attacking a few while extolling millions of elected and “public servants” who rob daily the public coffers.
Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope generated roughly $15.6 million.
Joint Penguin deal with Michelle, $65 million (A Promised Land sold 890,000 on publication day).
Netflix deal, $50 million.
So, much to your disappointment I’m sure, Obama appears perfectly legit.
As for Farage, let’s not forget that his platform in Clacton is that those accused of taking bribes should not be investigated. So, he doesn’t seem to have a principled objection to, ‘”public servants” who rob daily the public coffers’.