Several of Reform UK’s ongoing financial scandals involve questionable payments from crypto tycoons. The key issue in several of the controversies is that Reform and its politicians either failed to declare these amounts or they received them in a somewhat suspicious manner. The reason this issue is key is because people like Nigel Farage subsequently went on to shill for the crypto industry.
Some of the disputed donations and gifts are the subject of investigations. Depending on how those investigations pan out, Reform politicians may have to think twice about courting the crypto industry in future. For now, though, the party is absolutely raking it in:
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has received £20m in donations from cryptocurrency investors since the general election, The Independent can reveal.
Read more: https://t.co/1ViWtgd4gS pic.twitter.com/1jZwwnDfyd
— The Independent (@Independent) August 22, 2026
£20m
According to new analysis from the Independent, a full 60% of Reform UK’s declared donations come from individuals linked to crypto. The bulk of this – £15m – comes from one Christopher Harborne. This, of course, is the man who also gave Farage the undeclared £5m gift in 2024.
Other donors include Ben Peter Delo, the founder of cryptocurrency trading platform BitMex, who gave two £2m payments to the party this year and Maria Rost, the wife of US crypto investor John Rost, who has given nine payments worth £125,000.
Simon William Smith, a London-based bitcoin investor who founded a company which allows content creators to sell their content in exchange for Bitcoin, donated £116,000 ahead of the general election in 2024. Oscar Townsley, the founder of Bitcoin derivatives trading firm A1X, gave the party £30,000 last year.
It’s incredibly important to analyse these connections. As Grace reported for the Canary:
Even whilst he’s under investigation for taking an undeclared £5m ‘gift’ from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, Nigel Farage is still attempting to block a new cryptocurrency plan at the Bank of England (BoE). Something which could obviously hurt his biggest donor’s bottom line.
Harborne is part-owner of Tether Limited Inc. The company issues the eponymous cryptocurrency stablecoin ‘Tether’. Because Tether’s value is pegged to that of the US dollar, it allows users to trade their cryptocurrency for real-world money and vice versa. This fact makes it the most popular cryptocurrency in the world.
Harborne has made tens of billions from his stake in Tether. Notably, Farage was not a public advocate for crypto before he started taking large donations from people in the industry.
Reform — The Crypto Party
Farage accepted the £5m gift from Harborne — a crypto billionaire — in 2024. At the time, he’d said he wouldn’t run in the general election, but this changed after he received the £5m. The problem is that after he became an MP, he was supposed to declare any ‘registrable benefits’ from the previous 12 months. Farage did not declare the £5m, and now it looks like he was purposefully trying to hide it.
Harborne is a crypto billionaire, and Farage went on to shill for the crypto industry. Farage is also linked to the aristocratic fraudster George Cottrell – a.k.a. ‘Posh George’.
Posh George was convicted of wire fraud in the US, and he did time in prison as a result. The Posh George controversies include the following:
- Providing Farage with various undeclared benefits in the run-up to the 2024 election.
- Making undisclosed donations to Reform UK.
- Potentially transferring even more money to Reform via his mum.
Cottrell is British, but may not have been a permissible donor at the time when he made some of the above payments. This is because he was based in Montenegro, which is where his crypto gambling company Tether.bet was based. Tether.bet is linked to potential crimes in the UK; it also recently closed for business, although it remains unclear why.
Transparency
On the one hand, it’s good that UK transparency laws allow us to see who political parties take money from (when they bother to declare it). On the other hand, transparency is only good if it leads to honesty. And the only way that’s going to happen is if Reform suffers electoral consequences for cosying up to an industry which is linked to rampant wealth consolidation among the super rich.
Featured image via Bloomberg
By Willem Moore
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