A Ukrainian man was found guilty on June 15 of carrying out arson attacks on properties connected to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, on behalf of someone he knew only as EL Money.
Over a five-day period in May 2025, police were called to three separate fires, all in the Kentish Town area of the north London borough of Camden. One was at a building managed by a company of which the prime minister had once been a director and shareholder, another was at a nearby house where he previously resided and where his sister-in-law was living, and another blaze involved a Toyota car that used to belong to Starmer.
Roman Lavrynovych, 22, was found guilty in London’s Old Bailey Court of two counts of committing arson and being reckless as to whether life was endangered. Nobody was injured in the incidents, but people were inside the properties when they were set on fire.
Lavrynovych and Ukrainian-born Romanian national Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, were found guilty of conspiracy to commit arson. Another Ukrainian man, Petro Pochynok, 35, was acquitted of the same charge, while Lavrynovych was found not guilty of committing arson with intent to risk life.
Motive ‘No Part’ of Jury’s Consideration
The jury was told by the prosecution not to concern themselves with any possible motive for the crimes, as it was not relevant to the accused’s guilt or innocence.
Prosecutors said Lavrynovych had been offered payment to commit arson by an account on Telegram, which used the name EL Money.
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“It is no part of your considerations to decide who EL Money is and what reason he might have had to coordinate the actions of these defendants against these properties and this car associated with the prime minister,” prosecutor Duncan Atkinson told the jury at the start of the trial.
EL Money contacted Lavrynovych in both Russian and Ukrainian, the court was told. Atkinson said Carpiuc’s role consisted of planning and receiving payment.
Prosecutors did not state who or what entity was believed to be behind the Telegram account. The BBC reported after the verdict that its investigation had found EL Money to be a 23-year-old Russian diplomat with links to the Kremlin. This claim has not been verified by The Epoch Times.
The Russian Embassy in London told the BBC in a statement this week that it rejected “any attempt to associate Russia or its foreign ministry with unlawful activities.”
“[Russia poses] no threat to the United Kingdom or its people and harbours no aggressive intentions towards Britain,” the embassy added.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was last year asked about other media allegations of Russian involvement in the attacks.
“London is prone to suspect Russia in all the bad things happening in the UK,” Peskov said on May 26, 2025, according to Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency. “All these suspicions usually turn out to be groundless, unsubstantiated, and often ridiculous.”
‘No Evidence’ of Moscow’s Hand
Helen Flanagan, head of counterterrorism policing in London, said ahead of the verdict that there was no evidence Moscow was behind the attacks.
“Obviously, it was a Russian-speaking entity that created those taskings, but we have seen no evidence to link this back to any Russian-backed tasking,” she said. “At the moment, we’ve got no evidence to suggest that this was a state-backed threat and target on the prime minister.”
During his defense, Lavrynovych told the court that he thought that EL Money was more than one person and that one of the account’s users was a woman.
“I didn’t know where he contacted me from,” he said of EL Money.
A still from a police officer’s body-worn camera shows Roman Lavrynovych being arrested for arson attacks on property belonging to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on May 13, 2025. The Metropolitan Police
The prosecution said evidence recovered from his devices showed that Lavrynovych’s first jobs for EL Money entailed putting up posters or distributing flyers, before the tasks he was asked to do escalated to arson.
The court was shown messages in which EL Money told Lavrynovych that he needed to get out of the UK after carrying out the arson attacks.
“Look you attacked the home of a very high-ranking individual in Britain, I will send you money, you need to leave the city,” one message reads.
An image captured from a closed-circuit television camera shows a Toyota RAV4, formerly owned by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which was set on fire in Kentish Town, north London, on May 8, 2025. Metropolitan Police/via Reuters
Code Word ‘Geranium’
Lavrynovych was told that if detained by police, he should send a message with the code word “geranium,” and that EL Money would send a lawyer to help him, another message shows.
When asked by his lawyer during the trial whether he had ever used the code word, he replied: “No, I didn’t try to. I had no time for that.”
Frank Ferguson, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division, said after the verdict that such offenses “go beyond damage to property, they are intended to intimidate and undermine public confidence, and that will not be tolerated.”
Starmer, who in his legal career was head of the Crown Prosecution Service for five years before entering politics, has not commented publicly on the case.
Lavrynovych and Carpiuc will be sentenced on June 19.
Reuters contributed to this report.