> The Lebedevs also bought the Independent in 2010, and scrapped that paper's print edition entirely six years later.
A Russian intelligence officer owning two major UK newspapers seems like a seriously undercovered story.
There’s probably a case to be made for not allowing any Lords or MPs unless they are British by birth rather than naturalisation or descent.
It's Alexander who is the main concern really, but it doesn't seem so easy to separate Alexander from Evgeny.
Also someone who just happens to be rich because daddy is perhaps not worth of a peerage, and not entirely how the system is supposed to work. Unless he actually did anything special, which I don't think he did.
Are you sure? I think that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work and is how it’s always worked.
Quite how the House of Lords persists in a ‘democracy’ is troubling enough on its own.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-party-...
It was a big story in the UK for a while, Johnson also attended a party at Lebedev’s villa in Italy after a NATO conference.
Monarchy is ridiculous, lol. Lets keep giving these people validation like this.
Actually handing out power is more questionable, but I'm not sure whether Britain is worse or better than other countries in this regard.
Eg in Germany or the US you can also get some influence for money, you just won't get a fancy noble title with it.
I wanted to disentangle the two aspects.
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/15/lebedev-the-kgb-spy-who-h...
> Britain’s spies were not worried too much about the boy, Evgeny, a seemingly self-obsessed featherweight who once, while freelancing for the BBC, asked Alexander Lukashenko, the strongman of Belarus, what he thought about group sex. Their anxiety focussed on the father, a once and maybe current KGB/FSB actor, who helped put Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. All of Evgeny’s money flows from this single fact, that Putin was grateful to his father for his service as a spy and he was rewarded handsomely for it. And Alexander Lebedev still owes fealty to the master of the Kremlin.
> On the face of it, Alexander Lebedev looks like a model anti-Putin oligarch. He’s big mates with Mikhail Gorbachev with whom he part-owned the now closed Novaya Gazeta, the last good newspaper in Russia. He’s a liberal, or poses as such, and, like his son, he’s thick with the luvvies: friends with Kevin Spacey, John Malkovich, Sir Elton John, Ralph Fiennes who plays M in the Bond movies and Hugh Grant.
> No wonder Boris Johnson ignored warnings from MI6 that the Lebedevs were to be avoided. But look into Alexander Lebedev’s past and the story gets dark, very quickly.