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Nigel Farage has insisted the Thai-based crypto billionaire who gave Reform a record £9m donation “wants nothing from me”.
The multi-million-pound donation from Christopher Harborne, who previously donated to the Tories under Boris Johnson and bankrolled Brexit, is thought to be the biggest given to a party by a living person.
But the donation has prompted concerns about political funding from the Electoral Reform Society and Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which have both called for a change in the law. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems have called for a formal investigation.
Mr Farage has backed the deregulation of crypto and, shortly after receiving the donation, publicly promoted Tether, the cryptocurrency company that Mr Harborne is a shareholder in.
Asked about the donation, the Reform UK leader said: “Does he want anything in return for his money? I promise you absolutely nothing. Do I speak to him regularly? Maybe once a month, maybe once every six weeks, but certainly not more than that.”
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Crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, who is based in Thailand, gave £9m to Reform UK (Christopher Harborne)
Despite living in Thailand for more than 20 years and holding a Thai passport, Mr Harborne – a British-born businessman who sometimes goes by his Thai name Chakrit Sakunkrit – has contributed a significant amount of money to British political parties.
The businessman, who made his money as an aviation entrepreneur and through crypto investment, previously gave sizeable sums to the Brexit Party – Reform UK’s predecessor – in 2019 and 2020, but had not given money to politics for five years until this latest donation.
Asked at a press conference why Mr Harborne spends so much time in Thailand, the Reform leader said: “Because that’s where he’s been based for some of his business activities for many, many years … his natural home is here.
“His donation is nothing out of the blue. It’s nothing new. I mean, after all… he was a dedicated Brexiteer. He gave a significant amount of money to the Brexit Party at the time.
“I think what he wants to do, really, is to try and help us get onto a level playing field with the trade union-funded Labour Party and a Conservative Party where there seems to be a remarkable correlation, I can’t think why, between donations and membership of the House of Lords.”
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Harborne donated to the Tories under Boris Johnson (PA)
Reform UK’s total donations of £10.5m from July to September were the largest of any party for the period, followed by the Conservatives, who received just under £7m, figures released on Thursday by the Electoral Commission show. Labour received £2.5m while donations totalling just over £2m were given to the Liberal Democrats.
The £9m donation was made on 1 August this year. The following month, Mr Farage publicly promoted Tether, the cryptocurrency Mr Harborne is a shareholder in.
In an interview with Nick Ferrari on LBC in September, Mr Farage said of Tether: “We should hang on to this and wait till they mature and secondly, Nick, I’m going to go tomorrow to say this, you know, Tether is a stable coin.
“Stable coins are the way which money goes from conventional currencies through into cryptocurrencies and back again. Tether, about to be valued as a $500bn company. You know, stable coins, crypto, this world is enormous and I’ve been urging for years that London should embrace it.”
Before that, in May, Mr Farage announced via X (Twitter) that Reform would be the first party to accept crypto as a donation. On the same day, he announced to the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas that Reform UK would launch a “crypto revolution” and introduce a crypto assets bill.
At a cryptocurrency conference in London on 13 October, he said he wanted a “Big Bang 2 for crypto”.
A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission has confirmed that Mr Harborne is a permissible donor.
They said: “Parties can accept donations from individuals on a UK electoral register, including overseas voters. Christopher Harborne is a permissible donor.”
But Liberal Democrat Cabinet Office spokesperson Lisa Smart MP said: “The relevant authorities must investigate this donation and what appears to be a clear conflict of interest.
“If he promoted a product in return for a record-breaking donation, that is the sort of activity that is undermining our democracy and the public’s trust in politics.”
The Electoral Reform Society’s director of policy and research, Dr Jess Garland, warned: “We are seeing an alarming trend of parties receiving larger and larger donations from single super-wealthy donors and the public are rightly asking what these very rich people expect in return for their money.
“The UK is uniquely exposed in this new era of mega donors as we do not even have a donations cap, meaning parties can receive unlimited sums.
“The government urgently needs to reform our party finance laws to ensure that political parties are focused on bettering the lives of voters not super-rich donors.”
Dr Parth Patel, the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) associate director for democracy and politics, added: “We should all be concerned that wealthy individuals are accounting for a growing share of party funding.
“Christopher Harborne’s £9m donation to Reform is record-breaking, but comes in the context of more millionaires donating to political parties than ever before.
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Nigel Farage had previously struggled to attract donors to Reform UK (PA)
“The only real solution is for the government to introduce a cap on how much any one individual can donate in a given year. That a cryptocurrency investor based in Thailand would still be allowed to finance British democracy under the new election laws the government is trying to pass only highlights its holes.”
Reform was also helped with a £500,000 donation from property developer Nick Candy, who was a high-profile defector from the Tories last year.
Another £100,000 was given by William Alan McIntosh, the founder of Emerald Investment Partners, an investment company. Reform was also given a £50,000 donation by Viscountess Rothermere, the wife of the owner of the Daily Mail and its parent company, DMGT.
Mr Harborne is yet another former ally of Mr Johnson to have backed Farage and Reform UK. He follows former Tory chair Sir Jake Berry, former ministers Dame Andrea Jenkyns and Nadine Dorries, and a number of ex-Tory MPs, including this week Lia Nici, Chris Green and Jonathan Gullis, who were supporters of Mr Johnson.
He travelled with Mr Johnson to Ukraine when he was prime minister and gave him a well-publicised £1m donation.
It is believed that the £9m given to Reform UK is the largest political donation on record from a living person, and second only to who Lord Sainsbury left £10m to the Conservatives in his will in 2023 after his death.
