Arron Banks, left, with Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Andy Wigmore at Trump Tower in New York shortly after the president’s election victory in November 2016

Arron Banks briefed the CIA’s London bureau on his dealings with the Russian ambassador, he is set to claim to a Commons committee tomorrow.

Links between the multimillionaire founder of Leave.EU, his business associate Andy Wigmore and the Kremlin were revealed yesterday after a cache of emails was handed to The Sunday Times.

Mr Banks and Mr Wigmore were shown to have met the Russian ambassador three times since 2015, twice more than they had disclosed. They were said to have passed to the ambassador the phone numbers for Donald Trump’s transition team when he was president-elect, and the ambassador was alleged to have tried to loop them into a lucrative business deal involving Russian gold mines. The emails were passed to the newspaper