Arson gang plotted to kidnap Revolut CEO, court hears

A London court heard this week that the ringleader of an arson campaign targeting Ukraine-linked businesses had discussed plans to abduct Revolut’s co-founder, plunging what began as a series of property attacks into the realm of international political violence. Prosecutors told the Old Bailey that Dylan Earl, 21, admitted aggravated arson over a 2024 blaze that damaged firms supplying satellite kit to Ukraine and that in messages to a Russian handler known as “Lucky Strike” he discussed kidnapping Nikolay (Nik) Storonsky.

The case, which the Crown characterised as part of a “sustained campaign of terrorism and sabotage” linked to Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, has drawn attention both for the brazenness of the alleged campaign and for the apparent sophistication of the handlers directing it from abroad. Prosecutors say the attacks were not isolated vandalism but part of an effort to intimidate suppliers to Ukraine and to target high-profile individuals seen as adversaries of the Russian state.

Court documents and submissions described how Earl — who worked as a builder and has been portrayed by his defence as impressionable and vulnerable — engaged online with a network that encouraged acts of sabotage. That network allegedly tasked him with arson attacks on warehouses and discussed other operations across Europe, including a planned attack on a Czech warehouse and efforts to recruit individuals with military experience. Prosecutors presented these threads to argue the acts served a political end rather than random criminality.

For Storonsky — the founder of a fintech company born in Russia and now the subject of rumoured international pressure and threats — the revelation that his name featured in the defendants’ exchanges underlines the new contours of risk faced by businesspeople with transnational profiles. The court was told that the abduction talk formed part of a broader catalogue of proposed assaults intended to coerce or punish those viewed as hostile to Russian interests.

Judges and prosecutors were unsparing in their characterisation of the offences. At sentencing, the ringleader received a significant custodial term after the court accepted that the arson had caused substantially disruptive damage and that the conspiracy had a political dimension. The judge framed the offending as an attack on civic life and on liberty itself, noting the troubling reach of foreign actors who can inspire and direct criminality via online channels.

Defence lawyers sought to humanise Earl, depicting him as a young man coerced and manipulated via online contact, even suggesting elements of grooming by automated or offshore interlocutors. That argument did not, however, blunt the sentencing court’s assessment of the wider harm: beyond the immediate financial cost of burnt warehouses and ruined stock, the prosecution argued, the conspiracy sought to sow fear among a cohort of companies supplying vital equipment in the context of a war.

The case poses immediate questions for policymakers and for corporate security teams. How can private companies and their executives be better shielded from plots conceived in the darker corridors of transnational extremist networks? How should governments counter malign influence that seeks to weaponise local offenders at relatively low cost but with potentially outsized effect? Legal observers said the trial points to the difficulty of policing hybrid threats that sit somewhere between terrorism, organised crime and hostile state activity.

In court, the narrative that emerged was of an ordinary-seeming group of young men drawn into extraordinary violence by a mixture of ideology, online persuasion and foreign direction. For law enforcement, the verdict and the sentences that followed are a reminder that the landscape of domestic security now includes plots hatched in distant conflict zones but implemented on home soil — and that the targets of those plots may include not only state figures but prominent private citizens as well.