BBC whistleblower: bosses suppressing Russia stories
Tim Shipman, Political Editor | The Sunday Times
November 23 2019, 6:00pm, The Times
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BBC bosses have been accused of pulling the plug on politically sensitive reports into the close links between leading politicians and Russia.
John Sweeney, a BBC investigative reporter, has turned whistleblower and filed a complaint against the corporation with Ofcom, the broadcasting watchdog. He alleges investigations into Labour’s Lord Mandelson, the former Tory cabinet minister John Whittingdale, the Brexit funder Arron Banks, the oligarch Roman Abramovich and the far-right activist Tommy Robinson were all dropped.
He claims that other potential reports into “the pro-Russian sympathies of Labour spin doctor Seumas Milne” were never even commissioned by BBC editors and raises more concerns about Boris Johnson’s links with Russian oligarchs.
In 2014 Milne, who is Labour’s director of strategy and communications, attended a conference in Sochi where he met Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
In a hard-hitting letter to Sharon White, Ofcom’s chief executive, Sweeney says he worked on a Newsnight investigation of Mandelson in 2017 that led to the former cabinet minister changing his Lords register to show a shareholding in a Russian firm worth about £400,000. The investigation was never broadcast.
Sweeney accuses James Harding, the former BBC head of news, of making a “direct intervention” to stop the broadcast. It detailed how in 2013 Mandelson joined the board of Sistema, a Russian company that Sweeney’s reporting showed had historic connections to organised crime. The programme questioned whether Mandelson, in his role on the company’s audit and risk committee, should have examined a billion-pound deal made before he joined the company.
Sweeney’s sources, including a former MI6 officer, suggested the deal might have been a bribe for the then Russian president Dimitri Medvedev.
Mandelson denied any wrongdoing and emphasised that the deal had been done before he arrived at the company. He severed links with Sistema in 2016.
In his letter to Ofcom, Sweeney also claims a Newsnight investigation into the connections between John Whittingdale, the former culture secretary, and Dmytro Firtash, the pro-Kremlin oligarch, had been shelved. Whittingdale made five trips as a backbencher to Ukraine. These were funded by the British Ukrainian Society, which was set up by Firtash. In 2016 Whittingdale’s former lover Stephanie Hudson, a topless model, said he had discussed Firtash with her.
Whittingdale’s spokesman said in a statement: “John has never received any money or any other financial benefits from Dmytro Firtash or his associates.”
Sweeney also refers to investigations that he did not work on, including a Panorama programme on Abramovich and a BBC News investigation of Banks.
He left the BBC last year after 17 years amid controversy over his unbroadcast film on Robinson. One of Robinson’s aides secretly made a rival “documentary” and embarrassed him by showing footage of the reporter drinking on “expenses”. He says he paid for all the drinks himself. He insists the programme should have been broadcast anyway.
Sweeney writes: “BBC management, led by director-general Tony Hall, has become so risk-averse in the face of threats from the far-right and the Russian state and its proxies that due impartiality is being undermined and investigative journalism is being endangered.”
The BBC said: “From our interview with Prince Andrew, which has had profound consequences for the royal family, our recent investigation into anti-semitism in the Labour Party, our programme on the alleged cover up of war crimes by the British army, our three-part series on China under President Xi, to our expose into the abuse at Whorlton Hall, it is difficult to argue that the BBC does not produce hard-hitting public interest journalism.
“The BBC demands high standards from its journalists and expects them to behave with the necessary professionalism. As John knows, failing to do so compromises investigative journalism.
“Furthermore, investigative journalism can take years. The fact something has not yet been broadcast does not mean an investigation has finished.”
Sweeney responded: “True, the BBC has brilliant journalists who do great stuff, but that doesn’t mean that an exhausted and timid management doesn’t kill stories, especially about Russian influence on British politics up to and including the prime minister. High standards should rule out favouritism for friends — Peter Mandelson, Evgeny Lebedev, Seumas Milne — in high places. I hope Ofcom will address these issues.”
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