Lib Dem MP's Russian links questioned after aide 'interrogated by MI5'

The Russian links of Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock are under the spotlight after questions were raised about the extent to which he has in effect acted as a lobbyist for the Kremlin in the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe.

Colleagues from the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly said they were so concerned about the MP's pro-Russian views that they warned then Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy that the party might be plunged into scandal, although Hancock says that Kennedy dismissed the concerns.

Hancock, the MP for Portsmouth South, is the chairman of parliament's all-party group on Russia. At the weekend the Sunday Times reported that officials at MI5 were investigating his Russian parliamentary assistant Katia Zatuliveter over her alleged links with Russian intelligence.

Zatuliveter, 25, was questioned three weeks ago at Gatwick having celebrated her birthday in Croatia, the paper suggested. Officials allegedly grilled her about her connections to Russia's security service and appeared to know details of her love life, suggesting she was under surveillance, it reported. A spokesperson for the Home Office would not confirm or deny an official inquiry into Zatuliveter.

Mágyás Eörsi, the former chairman of the parliamentary assembly's liberal group to which Nick Clegg's Lib Dems belong, said he and his colleagues were frequently "stunned" by the pro-Kremlin stance taken by Hancock during parliamentary assembly debates and amendments.

"I wasn't surprised by this story at all. I don't say that Michael is a spy," Eörsi said. "But I'm very sure that the Russians use Michael quite deliberately. He is the most pro-Russian MP from among all of the countries of western Europe. You just have to read his speeches.

"When it came to debates on Putin, freedom of the media or the war with Georgia, Michael always defended Russia. Among the liberal bloc in Strasbourg we were all stunned by his position. According to him, Russia really is a fully fledged democracy."

Hancock, who denied ever receiving any benefits, directly or in kind, from the Russian state, also dismissed claims that his parliamentary assistant had links with Russian intelligence as "absolute rubbish". He said: "This isn't my problem. It is other people's personal problem. She [Katia] has told me every time she returns to the UK she has a hard time. I don't want to add any more."

He said he had criticised Russia over its wars in Chechnya, but had strongly backed the Kremlin during its conflict with Georgia because of his visceral dislike for Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili. "I was keen that Russia wasn't going to be fingered by Saakashvili. I'm very anti-Saakashvili," he said.

He went on: "My view of the Council of Europe is that I'm not there to be led by the nose any more than I was led by the nose here." Hancock claimed his voting record showed him to be less pro-Russian than many Tory members of the assembly. "The Tories vote en bloc with the Russians," he declared.

Eörsi, a Hungarian MP who led the assembly's liberal ALDE group between 2001 and 2009, said he grew so alarmed about Hancock's record on Russia that he raised the matter with Kennedy. "I warned Charles in 2006 there could be a scandal for the Lib Dems," he told the Guardian. "But he was too weak to intervene."

Kennedy's office did not respond today when asked to comment.

Eörsi also claimed that Hancock was well known in Strasbourg for turning up to Council of Europe parliamentary assembly meetings with Russian assistants. "Nobody knew who they were," he remarked – conceding that they may have been officials on legitimate assembly business.

In three debates, in October 2008, January 2009 and October 2009, over who was to blame for the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Hancock voted with the Russian delegation and against other members of his ALDE group. His name appears together with Konstantin Kosachev – the head of the Duma's foreign affairs committee – and several other Kremlin delegates.

"Hancock was co-signatory to basically all the Russian amendments. In the light of recent news about his associate, a question worth asking is: how is it possible that he has always been supporting the Russian agenda and voting together with the Russians?" Eörsi asked.

Hancock said that Eörsi and other members of the assembly from former communist countries were reflexively hostile to Russia, and wrongly confused it with the Soviet Union. He described Eörsi as a rival who had tried to have him thrown out of the Council of Europe.

Of Eörsi's meeting with Kennedy, he said: "Charles sent him away with a flea in his ear."

In January, soon after becoming chairman of parliament's all-party group on Russia, Hancock called for relations between London and Moscow, which have still not recovered from the 2006 murder of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, to be reset. He appeared to blame Gordon Brown's government, rather than Vladimir Putin's, for the poor state of relations.

"You have to see the all-embracing problem that you can't ignore the biggest country in Europe," Hancock told politics.co.uk. "The Germans, the French, the Italians, the Scandinavians haven't adopted this attitude. The only country that has taken such a hard line against the Russian authorities is the United Kingdom. You cannot ignore them. You have to engage."

During a debate a week later in Strasbourg, Hancock took issue with a speaker who complained about the Kremlin's failure to investigate the murders of journalists in Russia and the "enormous crisis of human rights" inside the country. To accuse Russia "without supplying any evidence" was "unacceptable in a democratic society" he said, in a point of order.

The Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly is the only forum where representatives from western European and former Soviet bloc countries get to can debate together. Russian delegates frequently use the assembly to reject western criticism – often witheringly – of Russia's elections, its human rights record, and its continuing military occupation of territory belonging to Georgia – which is also an assembly member.

Today, Russia's Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported claims that Zatuliveter was linked with Russian intelligence, under the headline: "Britons seek a 'Russian agent' in their parliament." It linked the allegations to July's dramatic spy scandal, which saw Moscow and Washington swap 10 Russian "sleepers" uncovered in the US for four alleged double agents. Zatuliveter denied the claims, the paper added.

According to the Sunday Times, MI5 is now investigating whether Russian sleeper cells are active in Britain.

One of Zatuliveter's friends said that she had also been interrogated in Gatwick on 8 August after the pair flew back from Split. "They had our names so they probably were listening to our phones," the paper reported her as saying.

In Moscow, meanwhile, riot police this evening arrested at least two dozen opposition protesters who had gathered in a central square to defend freedom of assembly. Moscow's city government had banned the anti-Putin rally, and dispatched truncheon-wielding officers to cart off demonstrators into waiting vans.

"This is an amazing way of dealing with democracy, shocking," said Dutch MP Thijs Berman, part of a delegation from the EU parliament's subcommittee on human rights.

Zatuliveter did not respond today to requests for comment

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/31/lib-dem-mike-hancock-russia