Nathan Gill was born in 1973 in Kingston-Upon-Hull. During his childhood his parents moved to North Wales where he attended school and college in Anglesey. After completing his education he returned to England to work in a family-owned business in Yorkshire. On 17 March 2004, Gill registered a company, Burgill Limited, with his mother Elaine Gill. The company provided social care services to Kingston-Upon-Hull council and is understood to have employed up to 180 staff. The company was subject to a compulsory winding-up order due to insolvency following a court hearing on 26 November, 2008.
Move from Conservative Party to UKIP in 2005
Nathan Gill began his political life in the Conservative Party before switching to UKIP in 2005. Gill worked as Personal Assistant to John Bufton MEP (2009-14), who became UKIP’s first MEP for Wales, winning a seat at the 2009 European elections. Gill would also hold the position of UKIP membership secretary. When Bufton stepped down at the 2014 European Elections, it was Gill who took his seat, topping the party’s list in Wales. At the Welsh UKIP conference in December 2014, Nigel Farage announced that Gill was to be the UKIP Wales leader.
UKIP leader in Wales
As Leader of the Party in Wales, Gill led the party’s campaign in the 2015 General Election. During the campaign, he drew criticism for denying the existence of man-made climate change. Although UKIP failed to gain any seats at Westminster, Gill was successful a year later, winning a seat in the Welsh parliament (the Senedd), representing the North Wales region. UKIP recorded 12.5% of the vote and a group of 7 UKIP AMs was returned to the Senedd.
Despite being party leader in Wales, Gill was not selected to lead the AM grouping in the Senedd, with former-Tory MP Neil Hamilton being chosen instead. Farage described this failure to select Gill as an “unjust act of deep ingratitude”. Gill was still midway through his term as an MEP.
Much of UKIP’s focus in 2016 had been on the EU Referendum with party leader Nigel Farage playing a prominent role in the leave campaign. With the leave side victorious, Farage stood down as UKIP party leader but kept his role as leader of the UKIP MEP grouping.
Joining Farage at the Brexit Party
Infighting in UKIP reached a peak in late 2018 under Gerard Batten’s leadership, caused in particular by his appointment of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. Tommy Robinson) as a party adviser. On the 6th December 2018, Gill resigned from UKIP, stating, “I have not left UKIP, UKIP has left me” and citing the party’s promotion of Tommy Robinson as an example. In this regard, his departure closely mirrored that of his close colleague Nigel Farage. Farage had announced his own resignation just two days earlier on his own LBC radio show. Once The Brexit Party had been set up, he joined Farage and prepared to fight the 2019 European elections. Now, as a Brexit Party candidate, he won another term serving in the European Parliament until the UK contingent withdrew due to Brexit.
At the 2019 general election, Gill ran for the Westminster seat of Caerphilly, coming 4th with 11.2% of the vote. With the Brexit Party taking on its current identity as Reform UK on January 4, 2021, Gill was appointed by Farage as leader of the party in Wales. He stood in the Senedd 2021 elections for the North Wales region but failed to be elected as Reform achieved just 1% of the vote. He left Reform UK just weeks later.
Investigation into alleged misuse of EU funds
In September 2016, the European anti-fraud body, OLAF, launched an investigation into Gill, alleging he had used European parliamentary funds for party political purposes. In August 2016, Gill published a statement criticising the investigation: “Having spoken to the police, I am in no doubt whatsoever that these claims – which are entirely bogus – have been made against me as part of an ongoing strategy to harry me out of position and to damage my reputation.” Nearly two years later, OLAF announced they had dropped their investigation stating their conclusion that they “found that the initial allegations were not substantiated”.
Links to pro-Kremlin figures in Ukraine
On the 17th March 2022, Welsh media outlet Nation.Cymru reported that Gill had, in 2018, attended a conference in Ukraine on the invitation of pro-Kremlin figures. Gill and two other Brexit Party MEPs, Jonathan Arnott and David Coburn, had visited Kyiv in October 2018. According to their expense declarations, their flights and luxury hotel accommodation were paid for by a supposed election monitoring group called the European Council on Democracy and Human Rights that was subsequently found to be a fake organisation. There is no suggestion Arnott or Coburn knew the outfit was fake at the time. Arnott told the Observer newspaper that he had been invited on the trip at short notice and had felt “very uncomfortable” about aspects of the trip.
Gill’s interest in Ukraine pre-dates these trips, as seen in his maiden speech to the European Parliament as a new UKIP MEP in 2014, in which he said: “The Ukraine is a buffer zone between NATO and Russia; the EU has taken away this buffer zone, potentially putting NATO tanks on the border with Russia. What you are doing today is throwing petrol onto the bonfire which the EU lit. Putin is not the biggest threat to our civilisation. The biggest threat is Muslim extremists.” His party leader, Nigel Farage, has also attracted controversy due to his repeated appearances on Russia Today and his statement in a GQ interview in March 2014 identifying Putin as the leader he admired the most as a political operator.
It would be the first of many interventions on the subject of Russia and Ukraine during his time in the parliament. Further reports in Nation.Cymru revealed details of more meetings with pro-Russian leaders in Ukraine and Moldova. It was around this time that he joined the board of pro-Kremlin news channels 112 Ukraine and News One, channels that had been shut down by the Ukrainian government.
Nathan Gill and colleagues make pro-Russia talking points in European Parliament
Police involvement
On 13th September 2021 was stopped by police at Manchester Airport under Schedule 3 of the Counter Terrorism and Borders Security Act 2019. His mobile phone was confiscated for further investigation. Subsequently, his home was searched, and officers seized further devices for examination. On these devices, evidence was found that Gill had been in contact with another person in Ukraine and that he had entered into an arrangement to make scripted statements in the EU parliament in support of pro-Russian media and their presence in Ukraine. The police were able to identify eight such instances of statements being made between January 2018 and February 2020. Gill was interviewed under caution in March 2022 but refused to answer any questions. Police continued to build their case and liaise with the Crown Prosecution Service, who then authorised various bribery charges against Gill, who was charged on 20th January 2025, three and a half years after the Manchester Airport stop.
Prosecution
At the Old Bailey, on 26 September 2025, Gill pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery between 6 December 2018 and 18 July 2019, under the Bribery Act, 2010 but not guilty to a further charge of conspiracy to commit bribery, under the Criminal Law Act 1977. At the time, his defence lawyer declared that prison time was inevitable for his client.
Sentencing
On Friday 21 November 2025, Nathan Gill was sentenced to 10 and a half years in jail, becoming the first ever British politician to be found guilty of such charges. The judge found that Gill had “advanced narratives advantageous to Russian interests concerning Ukraine”. His pro-Russian contact was identified as former Ukrainian MP Oleg Voloshyn who in turn had been working under the direction of Victor Medvedchuk a close friend of Vladimir Putin. Gill was found to have enlisted the help of four other MEPs to deliver the pro-Kremlin talking points. The court found that on 12 December 2018, just days after announcing his resignation from UKIP, Gill delivered a speech in the European Parliament critical of Ukraine’s “undemocratic practices”.
Responding to the sentencing, leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, declared “A traitor was at the very top of Reform UK, aiding and abetting a foreign adversary. Nigel Farage and his party are a danger to national security.”
Links to Farage
Nathan Gill’s links to Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK had been close for many years. Farage confirmed his links to Gill himself when campaigning for the Caerphilly byelection in 2025, He responded to a question on the Nathan Gill affair saying: “Have you ever been let down by anybody in your life?… It happens. And I’d known Gill for 20 years, I’ve been up to Anglesey, I’ve even seen where he preached. He was a devout Christian. I mean, talk about clean living, he wouldn’t even drink coffee. I’m astonished, but there you are. We can all be let down by people.” Farage had been the leader of the group of MEPs that Gill was a part of throughout the period that the police found the latter had been making pro-Russian statements.
Reaction to the sentencing
In many ways, the sentencing of Nathan Gill had been a historic event, being the first time a UK politician had been jailed for crimes under the Bribery Act. Commentators and political analysts called the sentence “long overdue,” questioning why Gill’s actions weren’t prosecuted sooner. Some drew parallels to wider issues of post-Brexit political corruption and Farage-linked figures. Sky News interviewed Zia Yusuf, who strongly condemned Gill’s actions but tried to disconnect Reform’s current leadership from him. Trevor Phillips pointedly connected Gill’s past conduct with Reform’s perceived softness on Russia.