Did ex-Labour peer Peter Mandelson lean on BBC to drop probe into his hyperlinks to Russia
The BBC suppressed a Newsnight investigation into Peter Mandelson’s alleged links to Moscow after the former Cabinet Minister placed pressure on the corporation, the journalist working on the story has claimed.
The 2017 report by veteran reporter John Sweeney was billed in the programme notes as an examination of ‘Lord Mandelson’s lucrative relationship with a Russian conglomerate that has had its brushes with organised crime’.
The investigation into Sistema, a Russian conglomerate with its headquarters in Moscow – which Mandelson had left in 2016 after a four-year term as non-executive director – included a picture of Arnold Spivakovsky, who held senior positions in the company despite his links to the Solntsevskaya crime gang.
Sweeney also questioned whether Mandelson, in his role on Sistema’s audit and risk committee, should have examined a billion-pound deal made before he joined the company.
Mandelson denied any wrongdoing and emphasised that the deal had been done before he arrived at the company, which he made clear in emails to the programme’s then-editor Ian Katz. He severed links with Sistema in 2016.
The claims come amid mounting questions about Mandelson’s links to Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Sweeney told The Mail on Sunday that ‘powerful forces’ had worked against him, saying: ‘We worked for months on the story.
‘It was cleared by an in-house lawyer and the head of BBC Legal, and given the green light at the 9am Newsnight meeting.
The BBC suppressed a Newsnight investigation into Peter Mandelson’s alleged links to Moscow after the former Cabinet Minister placed pressure on the corporation, the journalist working on the story has claimed. Pictured: Mandelson pictured leaving his house on February 14, 2026
Peter Mandelson at The Hague in the Netherlands with Vladimir Putin and EU Commission president José Manuel Barroso
The 2017 report by veteran reporter John Sweeney (pictured) was billed in the programme notes as an examination of ‘Lord Mandelson’s lucrative relationship with a Russian conglomerate that has had its brushes with organised crime’
‘But later that day the then Head of News, James Harding, called editor Ian Katz, producer Innes Bowen and me into his office and told us that the story would not be running that day: “It needed more work done.”
‘No one ever said: “We are killing this story.” But they never found time to run it. We were got at.
‘I felt like we were treading on a step that wasn’t there. It is hard for me to prove this but I felt powerful forces moving above our heads, blocking the story.
‘Eventually, the Russian gangster died of a “heart attack”. After I left the BBC, I wrote a letter to Ofcom complaining about this story not being run. Ofcom did nothing about it.’
Sistema was sanctioned by the US government in 2023 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Spivakovsky was arrested in 2017 and died two years later, aged 51, in murky circumstances.
The Daily Mail revealed yesterday that Mandelson took ‘ghost flights’ on a Russian oligarch’s private jet to a summit with Putin when he was EU trade commissioner.
The peer accepted luxury flights aboard a Gulfstream jet controlled by one of Putin’s favourite tycoons, aluminium billionaire Oleg Deripaska, before the EU slashed aluminium tariffs.
It helped Mr Deripaska to become one of the world’s richest men.
Earlier this month, the MoS revealed that MI6 was told Mandelson could be a risk to British security because of his connections with Russian intelligence, and that senior security officials believed his friend Jeffrey Epstein was running a vast ‘honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB.
The Gulfstream IV that took Mandelson to the Netherlands in 2004
Vladimir Putin and Oleg Deripaska at Sochi in 2008
Peter Mandelson with Jeffrey Epstein in one of the recently released batch of photographs
Brussels intelligence sources said EU security services warned their British equivalents in 2008 that Moscow was targeting Mandelson through his relationship with Mr Deripaska, and had been tracking his relationship with Epstein since 2006.
As a result of the tip-off, Mandelson is understood to have been interviewed by British security officials.
In the script for the unbroadcast Newsnight programme, Mandelson says the deal ‘was undertaken before I took up my duties as director’. He adds: ‘Why should I have looked at it closely?
‘My first board and committee meetings were not until the end of August 2013. I am not telepathic and in any case it would be odd for me to raise an issue about a transaction that, as far as I know, was straightforward and occurred before I joined the board.’
A spokesman for the BBC said: ‘Not all investigations make it to broadcast and many are years in the making.’
A BBC source added: ‘Having a legal view on a story is not the same as it being ready for broadcast/publication.’
