Farage's partner faces criminal fraud verdict

When not patronising female interviewers (last week he told Bloomberg’s Michal Hussain: “Listen love, you’re trying very hard”), Nigel Farage has been getting snippy with other journalists with questions over how his partner Laure Ferrari, a former waitress, managed to cobble together the £885,000 in cash to buy a four-bedroom home in Farage’s Clacton constituency.

The BBC examined French property and company records and were unable to find any evidence that Ferrari’s parents had the means to give their daughter a significant contribution. Yet the Reform leader has angrily denied any inference that the money must have come from him, and that he had passed it on to Ferrari, thus avoiding more than £44,000 in stamp duty as a second home owner.

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Now Ferrari’s funds face rather more serious questions. She faces a criminal fraud verdict in Brussels over alleged misuse of €730,000 in EU funds linked to Farage’s old Eurosceptic think tank, the Institute for Direct Democracy in Europe.

EU auditors refused to sign off the accounts back in 2016 after finding €218,000 in unverified and suspicious donor arrangements. The EU’s anti-fraud office, OLAF, later referred the case to Belgian prosecutors.

Now, after years of investigation, the court – Chamber 69 of the Brussels Tribunal – will deliver its final judgment on November 5. If Ferrari is found guilty, she could face large fines up to €500,000 – or just over half the cost of a house on the Essex coast. It will be interesting to see how GB News covers it if its star news presenter – one Nigel Paul Farage – is on hosting duties that night.