Senior British diplomat resigned after being filmed in a sexual encounter with two women thought to be prostitutes

On July 10, 2010 37-year-old British diplomat James Hudson stepped down as the UK's deputy consul general in the city of Ekaterinburg when the Sun tabloid published excerpts from a video with a man resembling Hudson having sex with two prostitutes. The 4-minute 18-second video first appeared on 6th July on the Russian website Informacia.ru and was picked up by Komsomolskaya Pravda in Yekaterinburg and the tabloid web site Life.ru. The Sun published a story about it on 9 July.

A short video entitled "Adventures of Mr Hudson in Russia" shows a portly figure, closely resembling Mr Hudson, strolling into a room wearing spectacles and a dressing gown and clutching a wine glass. He meets and kisses a blonde women, reported to be a prostitute in a brothel in the city. A second woman then walks into view and both of them strip down to their underwear. The four minute and 18 second film then shows explicit sexual scenes involving all three, at one point the man is seen opening what appears to be a champagne bottle while sitting on a sofa. There were suggestions that the video was filmed made by agents from Russia's FSB, the successor to the KGB, in an deliberate move to leave Mr Hudson open to blackmail.

A security source was quoted in The Sun newspaper as saying: "Russian intelligence has a long history of making sex films and taking compromising photos to control people or further its aims."

The Foreign office confirmed that the envoy, who has held a string of postings across Eastern Europe, had resigned.

An FCO spokeswoman said: "The FCO expects all its staff to demonstrate high levels of personal and professional integrity and takes all allegations of inappropriate behaviour seriously.

"That said, we are not in a position to confirm or deny the allegations in this story, and we do not generally comment on individual members of staff or individual personnel matters."

Hudson had previously served in Sarajevo, in the Balkans, with earlier postings in the Russian second city, St Petersburg, the Albanian capital Tirana, Skopje in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Budapest, Hungary.

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