Boris Johnson, the British foreign secretary, was photographed last month with Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor who allegedly tipped off former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopolous in early 2016 that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, in the form of “thousands of emails.” The image, posted on Facebook by a British-Indian associate of Mifsud, Prasenjit Kumar, appears to have been taken on October 19 at a Conservative Party fundraiser in Reading, outside London. Eleven days later, when court documents revealing Papadopolous’s guilty plea were unsealed, the previously obscure Mifsud became the focus of international attention.

Before the event, Mifsud had boasted in an email to a colleague seen by London’s Observer newspaper that he would be “meeting Boris Johnson for dinner re Brexit,” on that date. Alok Sharma, a Conservative member of parliament who worked with Johnson in the Foreign Office until June, confirmed to The Observer that he had spoken to Mifsud at the event and that Johnson was a featured speaker. Kumar makes a habit of posting photographs of himself with senior political leaders on Facebook. Another entry on his timeline shows him posing with Prime Minister Theresa May in July.

Kumar’s account also includes an image of himself with the president of Malta, posted in August, and another, from July, showing him, and Mifsud, posing with two men identified as members of the Albanian parliament. Before the image of Johnson with Mifsud was discovered on Saturday by Gavin Sheridan, an Irish journalist, the Foreign Office told Byline, a crowdfunded journalism site, that the foreign secretary had never “knowingly met this person, planned to meet this person, or indeed ever heard of this person.” That Johnson, drink in hand, was looking down and away as the photograph was snapped suggests that the encounter could well have been a fleeting one, and very unlike the kind of “meeting” Mifsud had described. Sheridan, a former social media reporter for the news agency Storyful, came across the image while digging into the online profile of another figure who had presented herself to Papadopolous as a potential conduit to the Kremlin, Olga Polonskaya, who was introduced to the Trump adviser by Mifsud. As Sheridan reported on Twitter, he found a Facebook page in Polonskaya’s name among Mifsud’s friends on the social network last month, immediately after the Papadopolous indictment was unsealed. That page was altered early on Saturday, after The New York Times identified Polonskaya as the 30-year-old from St. Petersburg Papadopolous initially mistook for a niece of Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Politico reported a day earlier that Papadopolous had referred to her in a campaign email by her maiden name, Olga Vinogradova.) Before Polonskaya’s page was changed, however, Sheridan archived a copy of the profile — which previously used two slightly different transliterations of the Cyrillic letters of her last name: both Polonskaya and Polonskaia.

The Polonskaya account is what led Sheridan to Kumar’s page, since, before the privacy settings were altered, he was able to see that she had liked two updates Kumar had posted — images of himself posing with Boris Johnson and Theresa May — as well as the Facebook page of the United States consulate in St. Petersburg. Like Mifsud, Kumar is involved in the administration of professional training programs that bring overseas students to the United Kingdom for courses of questionable academic merit. Kumar is currently director of the London School of Executive Training, which offers “short-term executive courses” to what its website describes as “the variety of audiences including Business Leaders, Bureaucrats, Politicians, Lawyers, Law Interns, Bankers, Trainee Students – Law, Management and Hospitality sectors, Faculties and other professionals.” The LSET has “a partnership” with the London Academy of Diplomacy, which is directed by Mifsud.

Prasenjit Kumar's London School of Executive Training was linked to Mifsud's London Academy of Diplomacy https://t.co/zv51BMIskE pic.twitter.com/PGG7Nmsm24 — Why to vote Green (@WhyToVoteGreen) November 11, 2017