Tory peer Greg Barker’s Russian dirty money fiasco is going from bad to worse. First, his boss Oleg Deripaska was whacked with sanctions by the US government, with shares in Barker’s En+ then plummeting. Next, the Foreign Affairs select committee condemned the flotation of En+ on the London Stock Exchange, with MI6 and US security officials expressing concerns about the IPO. So you can see why Barker would want to hire a lobbying firm to help him fight the sanctions…

Unfortunately, the firm Barker has chosen, Mercury Public Affairs, which is charging En+ more than $100,000 a month, is the subject of two subpoenas from Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian links to the Trump campaign. The Washington Post reported:

The investigators asked Mercury for information about their public relations work at Manafort’s behest for a Brussels-based organization called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, which pushed for improved relations between Ukraine and European countries. The Brussels group primarily advanced the interests of a Russia-friendly Ukrainian political party that had been a client of Manafort’s before he joined the Trump campaign.

So the firm Barker has brought in to spin for him amid allegations of links to Russia is itself being investigated for its own links to Russia. Quite a run of bad luck for Greg…