Gambling, crypto and suspicious money in Montenegro

The rusty iron gates and dirty tiled staircase of the unsightly premises on a quiet, dusty residential street in the centre of Tivat, where women hang laundry out of the windows and men drink cold beer and smoke strong cigarettes, give no hint that some of Reform UK's biggest figures and donors are among its tenants.

Billionaire crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who donated £15m to Reform and a private gift of £5m to party leader Nigel Farage, registered his company Longevity Biotech Systems at the address. The same applies to the companies of former Brexit Party communications chief Gawain Towler, former Brexit Party treasurer Mehrtash A'zami and Brexit campaign digital expert Sami Baty.

The office address where their companies are located is registered to Nino Pantović, the son of the former defense attorney of the so-called Posh George, or George Cottrell, a convicted criminal and close associate of Farage, who moved to this Balkan country after serving an eight-month prison sentence in the US for wire fraud.

But why do some of the most controversial figures associated with British Reform operate from an unassuming office in a town of 11.000 people, awash with Russian, and increasingly American and British, money? When I knock, the bewildered woman who answers the door offers few answers.

"We're just an accounting firm," he says. "They don't live here, they're abroad."

On Tuesday, growing scrutiny of Farage's finances, including revelations published in the Sunday Times that he had received undeclared material benefits from Cottrell, led the Reform UK leader to angrily resign as MP for Clacton.

"Let me be absolutely clear - I have done nothing wrong," Farage said, announcing that he would stand again for the seat he had vacated. "I have not broken the law in any way."

Yet months spent searching company registers, speaking to sources from the Montenegrin gaming industry, crypto industry, business and politics, as well as a recent visit to Tivat, reveal how, far from the gaze of the British public and authorities, some of the most enthusiastic supporters of Reform, particularly Cottrell, are building themselves a safe haven of shell companies, business interests, cryptocurrencies, casinos and real estate.

The office in downtown Tivat, which shows how closely intertwined Reforma’s many donors are, is only one piece of the puzzle. My investigation also found that both Cottrell and Touler have been accused of illegally supporting the pro-crypto and pro-European Montenegrin Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, which Spajić and Cottrell deny; and that a so-called crypto ATM, which a Montenegrin minister has linked to Cottrell – which he also denies – was seized from a casino owned by one of his business associates, while Montenegrin authorities remain tight-lipped about who actually owns the ATM and what it was used for.

As more details about Cottrell's life in the UK and his ties to Reform emerge, our findings show how Cottrell, a convicted criminal, gambler and financier who calls Farage "daddy", has become a key pillar of Reform's shadowy network of donors operating from the Balkans.

Cottrell: From Malvern to Mayfair to Montenegro

Perhaps growing up on Mustique, the ultra-exclusive Caribbean island where Princess Margaret once lived, drew him to the glamour of Tivat's marina. The son of Fiona, Prince Charles's ex-girlfriend, Cottrell returned to England as a teenager to attend Malvern College, a prestigious school with fees of up to £59.295 a year, from which he was expelled at 16 for gambling.

Cottrell chose the City of London over university, founding Upsilon Investments to manage the money of the Mayfair elite, along with the late Vivian Combs, a resident of the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. He worked at A'zami's firm Maxim Management Consulting from 2011 to 2014. A'zami, who has interests in the crypto sector, would later register Maxim Enterprises at a Tivat address.

By 2015, a now-defunct LinkedIn profile indicated that Cottrell worked at a private bank as a "client manager in the cross-border private banking department, responsible for onboarding HNWI individuals," or high-net-worth individuals, or as an "advisor to the investment manager of a fund of funds managed from the Cayman Islands."

That same year he became UKIP's head of fundraising, and Farage said the then 22-year-old was like a "son" to him. Cottrell seemed to be flying high, but he was arrested on charges of money laundering, wire fraud, blackmail and extortion while attending the 2016 Republican National Convention in the US with Farage.

The indictment states: "Starting in or around March 2014, a user identified as 'Bankar' advertised money laundering consulting services on the black market TOR network. TOR is an acronym for 'The Onion Router', a mechanism for anonymizing traffic.

The undercover agents contacted the Banker, posing as drug dealers seeking money laundering services. The Banker agreed to help the undercover agents launder their money for a fee, then suggested that the agents speak to his associate ‘Bill.’”

Bill was Cottrell. He “directed undercover agents to send £20.000 in cash, allegedly from drug sales, to his associate in Colorado, after which the money would be laundered through Cottrell’s bank account,” the indictment states.

The charges were serious, and Cottrell faced up to 20 years in prison. So it’s no wonder he accepted a plea deal in December 2016. The deal confirmed that Cottrell would “plead guilty to count 5” of wire fraud. Twenty counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering, money laundering, mail fraud, and other wire fraud charges were dismissed. He used the name “Cotrel” in his plea, one of at least two instances in which he used different spellings of his name in formal documents.

After his imprisonment, Cottrell returned to the UK, reconnecting with Eurosceptics and right-wing influencers in London pubs and at a party hosted by Aaron Banks, co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign and one of UKIP's biggest donors. In late 2018, Cottrell began a relationship with I'm A Celebrity star Georgia Toffolo, and later reportedly used the relationship to help get Farage on the same show. He then moved to Tivat in 2019, setting up Private Family Office, a firm that claims to provide "combined office administration services", and which, judging by its accounts, has been consistently losing money.

Where Cottrell went, Reform followed. Farage visited his protégé in 2019 for the Polo in the Port event. Gawain Towler has also become a fan of the city, visiting Cottrell in 2020, posting photos of Tivat on Instagram and opening an office in Cottrell's lawyers' building.

Having achieved political success in the United Kingdom, the Brexit boys seemed to want to repeat their work in Montenegro, but this time in the service of the pro-European party, PES.

In August 2024, the Montenegrin newspaper Vijesti wrote about Touler's claims that he provided media advice to the election campaign of former Finance Minister and now Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, while renowned political strategist Chris Bruni-Lowe, author of the Brexit Party slogan "change politics for good", claims in his book Eight Words That Changed the World that he also worked with Spajić's PES party, helping to devise its election slogan "it's time".

Nebojša Medojević, leader of the rival Movement for Change, has also accused Cottrell of helping the party in a political campaign. Cottrell's lawyers told us that it was a "politically motivated disinformation campaign" and that Medojević's petition "to the local prosecutor for a warrant was rejected on the grounds that it was a blatant political game."

Cottrell "has not made any political donations to Mr. Spajic or his party," they added, nor is he permitted to do so because of his citizenship.

Spajić denies that Touler, Bruni-Lou or Cottrel were involved in his political career, and Cottrel denies the same. There is no record in the report on the funds spent during the presidential and parliamentary election campaigns or any transaction in the PES bank statements that shows that money was paid to Touler or any foreigner or foreign consulting firm. Touler claims that he provided advice for free and that he had a “small contract” with the party, but the discrepancy raises questions about Touler and Bruni-Lou’s recollections of their involvement in the country’s politics.

Additional questions were raised when Kotrel launched the political consultancy Geostrategy in 2025. The original website contained footage of PES and several articles about Montenegrin politics. PES denied any collaboration with Geostrategy. The website was redesigned in March of this year, and all the articles, as well as footage from the PES meeting, were deleted, along with the company's Montenegrin address.

Cottrell's relationship with the politics of the country he adopted appears to continue: Geostrategy advertised a position this year for a political analyst based in Podgorica ahead of the "death match" of the 2027 elections. Cottrell told us through his lawyer that "as far as the positions Geostrategy is hiring for, these positions are not specific to any campaign."

Cottrell's involvement in British politics has also continued. In 2024, he flew a private jet, under the name George Coe, to help Farage as he successfully campaigned to become MP for Clacton. His mother Fiona briefly became Reform UK's biggest donor when she made three gifts of £250.000 each in 2024/25, while Cottrell himself paid £15.276,72 to fly Farage to a Trump fundraising event last year. Another reported benefit from Cottrell was an estimated £9.253,60 in flights and hotels for him and a member of staff, as well as security, to attend a conference in Belgium ahead of the 2024 election.

Labour MP Phil Brickell expressed concern about Cottrell's activities during a debate on foreign interference in December last year, saying: "Given that Cottrell has been accused of illegally funding a political party in Montenegro - an accusation he denies - I am deeply concerned about his closeness to members of this House. It is a great pity that Farage is not here to explain the behaviour of his right-hand man."

Brickell also said that during his visit to Montenegro, "several local politicians and officials expressed concerns" to him about Cottrell's local activities.

This week, the Sunday Times revealed that Cottrell's financial support for Farage went much further: it included "non-monetary" benefits, from Farage's administrative backroom to private security, staff, transport and accommodation, employing and paying three people to transform Farage's social media presence, as well as allowing Farage to use a property that Cottrell rents.

The article quoted Reform as saying: "Farage did not have to declare Cottrell's support because it preceded his announcement to stand for parliament, so he was not a politician at the time." The Sunday Times also reported that a Reform source added: "Farage almost always stayed at his own house and did not routinely use the London property."

Cottrell's life of controversy was not limited to politics. The gambling that led to his expulsion from school remained a big part of his life. He said he made six figures betting on the pound falling ahead of the Brexit referendum, but "lost most of it the next day" betting on horses. He recently lost $550.000 betting on the US-Iran war.

Gambling and crypto: The perfect match

A five-minute walk from the office block is Salon Prive, a casino interesting for three reasons.

The first is that George Cottrell once boasted that he lost $20 million at its tables, although his occasional girlfriend, Anđela Vukadinović, disputes this. The second is that the casino owner is an associate of Cottrell who had previously gone bankrupt. The third is that in June 2023, a crypto ATM, a device that allows users to convert cash into cryptocurrencies and vice versa, went missing after being seized from the casino premises.

The casino opened in 2021, and glossy social media posts have portrayed it as a glamorous destination for Porto Montenegro’s A-list. A promotional video shows women in elegant dresses and men in sunglasses and suits walking along the waterfront to their seats at the gaming tables. The website boasts of its support for philanthropic endeavors, including the Miss Montenegro pageant — hardly a charitable cause, though it’s notable that Vukadinović was a former winner.

But on a sunny Friday afternoon, the atmosphere at Salon Prive is far from exciting. The two waitresses gossiping at the entrance seem agitated when I ask for a drink. “We need to see your passport first,” one says, trying to scan it, then settling for a photo. I later learn that it’s a new law designed to prevent money laundering.

Loud 80s dance music plays in a darkened room, the only light coming from rows of screens showing football matches and odds lists, from the lights of slot machines and roulette tables. The VIP area is off limits to me, tucked behind a shelf decorated with ugly silver skulls. Between songs, a deep voice informs me that this is "Salon Prive, for real players only."

According to Montenegrin company records, Salon Prive's director is British-Malaysian businessman Hon Kong Jong, who declared bankruptcy in the United Kingdom in 2016 before re-emerging as a Montenegrin success story. Swedish entrepreneur Gustav Sander, who was the director of Cottrell's Private Family Office, was the casino's chief operating officer.

Salon Prive is ultimately owned by Hong Kong-based Global Trust Limited, the parent company of several businesses based in Montenegro. It shares an address with Cottrell’s Private Family Office. According to its website, it “manages funds in multiple jurisdictions that actively seek to acquire established online and land-based gaming licenses and operators with exposure to emerging and non-traditional markets.” It has an office in the notorious tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.

The casino made headlines in 2023, when its crypto ATM was seized by police.

"We have been informed that there is a crypto machine in the municipality of Tivat that is used for trading cryptocurrencies," Montenegrin Finance Minister Aleksandar Damjanović told local media at the time of the seizure. "We know that there is no legal basis for trading cryptocurrencies in Montenegro and that everything related to possible trading through that machine is illegal."

Damjanovic said Cottrell was connected to the machine, which Cottrell denies. His lawyers told us that “our client had no connection whatsoever to any ‘crypto-ATM’ on those premises.”

"We add, in any event, that our client has been informed that civil regulatory oversight of Salon Prive has been conducted by the Gaming Authority, the department of the Ministry of Finance that regulates licensed gaming premises. He is not aware of any criminal investigation, let alone indictment, of any individual in connection with the crypto-ATM."

Journalists, transparency activists, and crypto-businessmen I spoke with in Montenegro told me that the seizure raised more questions than it answered. In the two years since the raid, Montenegrin authorities have not shared any additional information about the machine, including information about its users, the origin of their funds, and whether any transactions conducted through the machine warrant a criminal investigation.

"We are faced with complete silence from the government about who owns the machine, where it is located and what its transactions were," said Vuk Maraš, a reporter for BIRN, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

Although Montenegro has taken cautious steps toward regulating cryptocurrencies, much work remains to be done. As one crypto technologist told me: "'What law did they seize it under?'"

OpenDemocracy reached out to the Montenegrin government for comment on the seized ATM, but did not receive a response before publication.

One of the first things you notice about Montenegro is that cash is king. The country has adopted the euro as its base currency, which is another reason why it has become a magnet for people who deal in cash and, more recently, cryptocurrencies.

During my stay, I spoke to a number of crypto-entrepreneurs who explained that Montenegro has embraced digital currency because of the curious and entrepreneurial nature of its people, a desire to seize new opportunities, and a general distrust of the banking system, which is a legacy of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. High banking fees, slow money flows, and the fact that Montenegro is not a bustling financial hub like London or New York mean that crypto offers a new and fast way to invest and do business.

The byproduct is the almost complete opacity of the financial transactions that help drive the country’s economy and shape its politics. “Despite Montenegro having adopted various anti-corruption laws and established new institutions, none of these bodies are truly independent from political influence,” Transparency International said in a recent report. It added that the country “must reform the financing of political parties and elections, particularly when it comes to foreign funding.”

In the early 2000s, it seemed that Montenegro would become the crypto capital of Europe. Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, a former Goldman Sachs employee, was keen to embrace the new technology. But crypto enthusiasts kept running into a problem: the lack of a regulatory regime. All the crypto industry sources who wanted to talk to me said that regulation would make it easier to work with banks and prevent criminal use of the currency.

"We want regulation so that good guys can come and invest here," said Ivan Jolicic, co-creator of Montenegro's digital currency Perper, who worries that the country has lost momentum in the cryptocurrency field. "We could work on advancing new technologies, but without laws we can't do big projects."

Of course, some want things to stay exactly as they are. In his book Everybody Loves Our Dollars, journalist Oliver Balou explained that "analysts estimate that the amount of money laundered through this new model of trade-based money laundering could be in the tens of billions, but in reality they have no way of knowing [...] as with other money laundering techniques, cryptocurrencies have not replaced older methods, but rather joined them."

All the crypto people I spoke to saw regulation as a way to increase transparency. But in the absence of a strong regulatory regime, traceability disappears - as local investigative journalists have discovered.

Around $2,2 billion in crypto transactions passed through crypto wallets linked to Montenegro between November 2021 and 2022, largely without any government oversight or record keeping, a BIRN investigation has found. The Ministry of Finance told BIRN that it does not have data on transactions linked to crypto assets, nor is it required to record such data.

Crypto-industry sources and investigative journalists told me that crypto is being used to buy all sorts of things in Montenegro, including luxury real estate in its booming coastal market. Everywhere I went, ads promoted beautiful apartments overlooking the sparkling blue sea, where palm-fringed towns nestle at the foot of green, forested mountains — and where a residence permit can be obtained in as little as two weeks.

Until recently, the notary managing the sale of a property didn't even have to provide proof that the crypto had actually changed hands. The buyer and seller just had to say it happened. You don't have to be a bank compliance officer to understand the inherent money laundering risks in such a transaction.

As the placement of a seized ATM in a casino suggests, crypto has also opened up new opportunities for gambling.

Cottrell has become a “key player,” the Sunday Times reported, at Tether.bet. The crypto-gambling platform was launched in 2020 and acquired by GT Holdings, a company based in Curacao, an island nation in the Caribbean known as a tax haven.

Tether.bet uses Tether, a crypto company partly owned by major Reform donor Christopher Harborn, who dined with Cottrell and Farage in Mayfair just before the crypto betting platform launched in 2020. Tether is a stable cryptocurrency with the ticker USDT, pegged to the US dollar, meaning that a user can exchange it for physical dollars at face value at any time.

However, in 2021, New York state authorities fined the company for lying in public statements and forced it to admit that it did not have enough assets to redeem all the USDT it sold.

An analyst quoted in Ballou's book said that Tether "sounded good" when it talked about fighting illicit use of its coins, but that its "actions don't follow suit, in my experience. The vast majority of illicit activity and crypto-assets have moved to Tether over the last few years."

The company also does not have a license to operate in Britain, meaning that UK users are prohibited from gambling on the site. The Sunday Times reported that the company had an office and bank account in Montenegro, claimed to have a gaming license from Curacao, while processing payments through Cyprus.

According to the same Sunday Times investigation, two men, in addition to Cottrell, were involved in the platform from an early stage: David Robery, a software expert who lived in a cottage next to the Cottrell family home in the Worcestershire countryside, and Hon Kong Yong of Salon Prive.

Montenegrin cadastral records show that Roberi bought an apartment in Regent, the luxury Tivat apartment tower where Cottrell allegedly lived. The apartment was owned by Sidra 501, which was later acquired by Hong Kong-based Global Trust Limited. Roberi, interestingly, was the only follower on the Twitter account for Geogar Racing, a business that Cottrell founded in 2011.

Cottrell's use of Tether.bet has raised questions. Documents filed as part of a lawsuit against betting syndicate Starlizard, linked to Brighton & Hove Albion owner Tony Bloom, allege that Cottrell asked professional gambler Ryan Dudfield "if he could assist in identifying people living in England and Wales who might be interested in using the website 'tether.bet'".

Dudfield, identified in the documents as “the plaintiff,” did not do so “because he was concerned that tether.bet was not licensed by the UK Gambling Commission.” The documents outline an alleged agreement between Bloom, the union, Cottrell and Dudfield, which includes a claim that the union would “cease placing bets on gambling platforms in which Mr. Cottrell has a financial interest, such as tether.bet.”

Attorneys representing Cottrell told us that he was never a director, employee, or consultant of Tether.beta, that he never had management control or control over Tether.beta's bank account, that he never acquired customers for Tether.bet, and that he was never involved in running its operations.

In the same court documents, Kotrel is described as not being a “very successful gambler.” A gaming industry source I spoke to on the sidelines expressed doubts about Kotrel’s gambling abilities and wondered why he was so eager to promote stories about his big losses. This made him very suspicious of Tether.bet’s ability to make money.

That's another question about Cottrell: just like with the cash in the crypto ATM, we don't know exactly where his money comes from. He once boasted that he had access to a £250m trust fund, although his mother Fiona said in 2017 that the claims were "ridiculous, absolute nonsense".

The Sunday Times reported that, despite her large donations to Reform UK, legal documents from 2023 described Fiona Cottrell as a “retired stylist” and showed that when her husband died, his estate – which she managed – was valued at £1,5m. Now, the Guardian reports that a £1m donation made by Ms Cottrell to a company run by Reform deputy Richard Tice has been reported to the National Crime Agency over concerns about the origin of the funds. Bankers have also filed “suspicious activity reports” over two loans Tice received from George Cottrell.

Crypto and the global far right

If Tether is close to the hard right in the UK thanks to Harborne, on the other side of the Atlantic it is close to the hard right through financial giant Cantor Fitzgerald, which provided it with banking services. Donald Trump nominated Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick as his Secretary of Commerce in 2025, the same year Tether moved to El Salvador, another crypto-friendly country.

Like Spajic in Montenegro, both Trump and Farage have portrayed themselves as crypto-friendly, as have far-right political figures across Europe. The US president, who has reportedly made $2 billion from his crypto activities, gave a keynote speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, telling the audience: “When we see attacks on crypto, it’s part of a much broader pattern by left-wing fascists who use government as a weapon against any threat to their power.”

Reform, meanwhile, became the first political party in the UK to accept crypto donations, with claims that it accepted the digital currency via a third party as an allowed donor before it was converted into pounds. The UK government has now imposed a temporary ban on crypto donations. The party has also proposed industry-friendly crypto policies, including low taxation of crypto, namely a 10% capital gains tax, legalizing paying taxes in crypto and creating a sovereign bitcoin reserve fund. A crypto firm sponsored the party’s Reform UK 2025 conference, and Farage invested £215.000 in bitcoin vault company Stack BTC.

Farage is now facing an investigation into his crypto lobbying, as his favoritism towards the industry appears to benefit his donors.

Throughout the research and conversations I conducted while working on this piece, local Montenegrins expressed concern about how deeply Cottrell and his circle of Reform donors had embedded themselves into the country's political economy.

For here men like Cottrell are building a social and political infrastructure that welcomes the hard right of British politics: a place where the sun shines, the bars are welcoming, the yachts are huge, and protection is cheap.

"We have to expose this," one source told me. "Because we don't want your bad guys coming here."

openDemocracy.net

The text was translated using artificial intelligence.