Sergei Cristo

Sergei Cristo is a former BBC journalist, a political activist and a specialist in media communications, asset management and sustainable investment. 

Sergei studied biology before continuing to study Communications at Golsmiths College, University of London. He worked as a BBC journalist in 1990s. Inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the Cold War, he joined the British Conservative Party shortly after Putin came to power in Russia in 2000.

Around the same time, he moved from journalism to investment. Working for many well-known asset managers in London and Paris (BlackRock, BNY Mellon and HSBC Global Asset Management among them) as a specialist writer and PR over the past 25 years, Sergei also helped the British Conservative Party to attract young professionals, who had the potential of becoming financial donors.

In the course of his work with the Conservatives, he founded the Carlton Club’s Dinner Debates on Foreign Affairs and National Security, attended by academics (such as Prof Chrstopher Andrew, former intelligence officers, such as Oleg Gordievky CMG, ambassadors, ministers, well-known writers, journalists, lawyers and even the Archbishop of Canterbury (on the topic of the global refugee crisis).

Sergei has also established an educational programme for prospective parliamentary candidates, taking a group to Estonia under the auspices of NATO to learn about European security.

In 2012 and 2023, he came to prominence after exposing how the Russian Government was looking to route illegal political funding to the British Conservative Party. Just before Brexit, he left the UK to live and work in France.