Within hours of Searchlight reporting yesterday on the death of Patriotic Alternative treasurer Steve Blake, some of the many online enemies of PA leader Mark Collett started making sensational allegations about Blake’s financial connection to fake businesses that were fronts for Russian intelligence.
Blake’s involvement in the British nazi scene dates back to the early 1980s, but he went through several phases of apparently dropping out of politics, trying (and mostly failing) to establish a business career using the same IT skills that made him invaluable on the far right.
Suspicious front companies
At least one of these businesses seems to have been part of a network of suspicious front companies created by the family of a former KGB officer who is strongly suspected of continuing to work for Vladimir Putin’s European network of espionage, subversion and money-laundering.
At the centre of the network is Blake’s former business partner Michail Roerich, aka Michail Sergios Kolpidis (born September 1991) – who often refers to himself by the invented title Duke of Commonwealth – and his parents, Sergey Kolpidi (born May 1960) and Larisa Kolpidou.
Though they have registered a host of companies in London, they seem to be based in Athens and there is no sign of them having homes in the UK.
Their most outrageous scheme involved Gofer Mining plc, incorporated in London in 2019 as part of a plot to take control of a Ukrainian gold mine.
Via Gofer, the Kolpidi family set out to hijack the privatisation of this mine by the Ukrainian government and prevent its sale to a genuine company, Avellana plc.
Gofer sent letters to a local village council near the mine and created an impressive cover, pretending to have ties to Barclays Bank and to a host of British establishment figures.
Eventually the Ukrainian supreme court ruled that Gofer had no basis for ownership of the mine, but the company continued promoting itself with grandiose claims. Although a whole web of fake companies and foundations are connected to Gofer, even the firm’s auditors turned out to be fake.
A typical aspect of these frauds is that when not posing as royalty or aristocracy, many of the central players call themselves “Dr”. One such is “Dr” Oleksandr Mashtepa (b June 1978), described as Gofer’s “head of Ukrainian operations”.
Mashtepa was one of the defendants in a legal action brought by the real gold mining company Avellana, whose head Brian Savage describes Kolpidi, Roerich and their colleagues as an “experienced group of criminal corporate raiders”.
The story can be traced back to Roerich’s childhood in the 1990s, when his father “Kolpidi” – then calling himself Sergei Gavrilov – was one of many former KGB officers trying to grab whatever they could during the Eastern bloc’s transition from communism to capitalism.
Gavrilov/Kolpidi took over an established financial institution in Warsaw, the Guarantee and Trust Bank, which the Polish authorities closed down in April 1997 after linking it to money laundering schemes.
Flag of convenience
Poland’s security services believed that Gavrilov/Kolpidi was part of what Radio Free Europe described as “a broader Russian undercover plan to shatter by economic and political means Poland’s credibility with its Western partners.”
Gavrilov/Kolpidi was born in Canada to Soviet parents in 1960 and by the late 1990s was a citizen of Belize, though this was assumed to be a flag of convenience.
In March 2006, in line with his new Greek cover identity, he created the London registered shipping company Sunlight Maritime Limited, with purported headquarters in Athens and regional offices in South Africa and the USA.
Sunlight Maritime seems to have been the first of a vast web of companies created by Gavrilov/Kolpidi and his family.
Veteran neo-nazi
And this is where PA’s treasurer, the veteran neo-nazi Steve Blake comes in.
One of these companies – Pendotek Limited – was owned by Blake and was registered at what was then his home address in Suffolk, a former pig shed which he converted into a home.
Pendotek was incorporated in Ipswich in December 2012 by Blake’s fellow IT consultant Chris Baxter but it seems likely that Baxter was acting on Blake’s behalf without knowing that Blake in turn was acting for the Russian network.
Three months after it was registered, Baxter handed over his directorship and ownership of the company to Blake.
Steve Blake owned 100% of the company, but during 2013 the mysterious Michail Kolpidis (then aged 21) came on board as a director, as did another of the network’s regular operatives Douglas Garforth (grandly and falsely described in some of the gang’s documents as “the Right Honourable Douglas Garforth” and as “Crown Liaison”).
Bitter split
Blake signed the company’s accounts in 2014 but these were the first and only accounts ever submitted. Pendotek was dissolved in February 2015.
In November 2017 Blake, now describing himself as a “game designer” set up another company, Hriddel Limited, but this remained dormant until being dissolved in April 2021.
Blake’s connection to Russian money launderers predated the creation of Patriotic Alternative. It’s possible that it was simply one of his unsuccessful efforts to make money while in the political wilderness after his bitter split from Nick Griffin’s BNP, but there are just too many Russian connections to this whole shady scene for us to accept it as coincidental.
As we reported yesterday, Blake had a history of international connections dating back to his student days as a BNP activist at St Andrews University, when he set up a mail order business importing nazi and holocaust denial literature from the USA, including material published by the violent, terrorist-linked National Alliance.
Terror plots
When Blake went into business with Russian intelligence money-launderers in 2013, Moscow agents were deeply involved in diverse sections of British right-wing politics. These ranged from Eurosceptic pressure groups working with UKIP and the Tory right, to paramilitary training camps for hardcore nazis.
Among the latter were founders of National Action, later banned for terrorism after plots including the planned assassination of a Labour MP.
Superficially rival tendencies soon developed, with one pro-Ukraine faction (known as the Misanthropic Division) attempting to recruit young British nazis to support what was then the Azov Battalion.
These efforts were led by an Italian fascist, Francesco Fontana, who spoke at a conference organised by the long-established nazi magazine Heritage and Destiny.
That pro-Ukrainian section of the British far right still exists and has allies in Spain, France and Italy. But it’s now outnumbered by the pro-Russian faction led by Patriotic Alternative’s Mark Collett.
Until now we suspected that Collett’s enthusiasm for Russia stemmed from his international contacts with Putin fans such as David Duke, the former Klansman and active Russian propagandist.
Yet recent revelations about Steve Blake add credibility to frequent allegations by some of Collett’s enemies on the right that there is some financial connection between PA and Russian intelligence.
Another strange twist in the tail is that one of the first online tributes to Blake after his death came not from PA but from his former friend (and now presumed to be factional enemy) Kenny Smith.
The two men had been allies against Collett almost twenty years ago, then went into PA together. But when Smith broke away from PA to launch the Homeland Party, Blake stayed with Collett.
So why was Smith so quick to pay tribute to Blake as a comrade, quickly echoed by the pro-Ukrainian assistant editor of Heritage and Destiny, Peter Rushton, and another northern ex-BNP nazi Kevin Scott, who was a founder member of the British Democrats?
The plot thickened yesterday when Smith announced he is about to travel to Norway to be guest speaker at the Norway Democrats annual conference. The ND has existed since 2002 without making much political impact, and it’s now best known as a propaganda mouthpiece for Putin.
This party is so extremely pro-Russian that it expelled its founder and all of its elected representatives in its few local strongholds, purely on the grounds that the national party leadership wanted to support Putin whereas these senior officials and elected councillors were pro-Ukraine.
Unlike Smith’s other international friends such as AfD in Germany and “Identitarian” leader Martin Sellner in Austria, the Norway Democrats are a tiny organisation that has become even tinier thanks to their dedication to pro-Moscow politics.
There’s really no reason for a British “nationalist” to be specially attracted to this particular group unless he is pro-Putin.
What makes the situation even stranger is that Smith has usually portrayed himself as neutral on the Ukraine-Russia question, unlike Collett who is blatantly pro-Russia.
Yet Collett’s recent abortive trip to Sweden, which ended in his being banned from the entire Schengen zone, was in association with a pro-Ukrainian fascist group, Dan Eriksson’s Det Fria Sverige (Free Sweden).
Not for the first time we are forced to wonder, what are the real agendas being played out by the supposedly pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian factions of the British and European far right?
