Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has been pulled deeper into controversy after two crypto billionaires poured almost $100 million into his party in the space of two days.
The two men at the center of the story are Christopher Harborne and BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo. Their donations, on top of an earlier personal gift to Farage, have turned the issue into one of the most closely watched political funding disputes in Britain this year.
Farage first received a $6.3 million personal gift
Farage, 62, rose to national prominence through the Brexit campaign and has long built his political identity around nationalism, confrontation and media visibility. In 2023, he appeared on the reality show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, where he was paid $1.86 million and finished in third place. He has also worked as a well-paid brand ambassador for London gold dealer Direct Bullion.
Those earnings were overshadowed by a much larger payment in April 2024. At the time, while campaigning for the party in a personal capacity, Farage received $6.3 million. He later said the money came from pro-Brexit British crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who has long lived in Thailand under the name Chakrit Sakunkrit, and described it as an "unconditional gift."
Harborne told The Telegraph in April that the donation sought "nothing in return."
The payment quickly drew questions. The Sunday Times estimated Harborne’s fortune at about $24 billion, with much of that wealth tied to an early investment in Tether, the issuer of USDT. In June that year, Harborne met the governor of the Bank of England and urged the central bank to shelve the digital pound project known as Britcoin. Because a launched Britcoin would compete directly with Tether, the size and timing of the gift prompted speculation over whether any conflict of interest existed.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is now investigating Farage over his failure to declare the £5 million gift from Harborne. Farage has denied wrongdoing.
Undercover footage brought police scrutiny
The undeclared gift was only the start of Farage’s problems.
In early September, Channel 4 released secretly recorded footage that appeared to show Farage and senior Reform UK figures discussing ways around Britain’s ban on overseas campaign donations. In one clip, Farage was shown drinking wine and eating oysters while praising a poll that was said to have been funded by an American billionaire.
Days later, the Metropolitan Police opened an investigation to examine whether election law had been broken.
A Reform insider told the BBC the party looked "a bit like a pirate ship." One loyal supporter’s answer to that chaos was simple: send in more money.
Delo and Harborne each gave $48.7 million
On Sept. 11, crypto billionaire Ben Delo, who has described himself as a "maths geek," donated the equivalent of $48.7 million to Reform UK. The payment was described as the largest single political donation in British history.
Writing in The Telegraph, Delo said he wanted to help Reform UK grow into a credible party capable of governing.
The next day, Harborne matched him with another $48.7 million donation. In his own Telegraph article, Harborne wrote: "My competitive instinct drove me to follow that donation, and so I did."
In just 48 hours, Reform UK secured close to $100 million, a sum that sharply altered the funding picture in British politics.
Britain does not have U.S.-style super PACs, and public funding for parties is limited, mainly covering parliamentary work and policy research rather than campaign spending. Sam Power, a lecturer at the University of Bristol who studies political finance and corruption, said total campaign spending by all candidates across all constituencies in the last U.K. general election came to only $125 million.
"We are seeing British political fundraising become more Americanized, and the American system is one we regard as a cautionary example," Power said. He added: "This is not just a Reform problem. It is a system problem. It forces everyone to ask whether this is really the direction we want British democracy to take."
Crypto money is moving closer to the center of politics
The report argues that Britain is not alone. In the United States, crypto companies and the billionaires behind them have become a major force backing candidates in both parties who favor industry-friendly regulation.
Donald Trump once attacked crypto as highly volatile and baseless, but later changed course. The report says that in the first year of his second term, his family’s crypto businesses brought in more than $1.4 billion, with a large share tied to the TRUMP meme coin.
Representatives for Farage declined to comment for the article. Delo and Harborne also declined interviews. Farage has long cast himself as a British version of Trump, a fighter taking on traditional finance, the political establishment and mainstream media.
At first glance, he might seem an awkward champion for crypto. He places heavy emphasis on borders, while digital assets move across them. He has also favored Tether, based in El Salvador, over a homegrown digital pound carrying the word "Brit" in its name. Even so, crypto’s anti-establishment image fits the outsider persona he has spent years building.
Money, ambition and Farage’s political path
Farage’s background helps explain that image. Michael Crick, author of One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage, said Farage did not attend university and worked in metals trading in the City of London, where he was not especially successful. He later spent more than 20 years as a member of the European Parliament. The role paid well, but not on the scale of finance.
"He certainly craves all the things that wealth brings," Crick said. "At the same time, he carries a sense of frustration because he devoted his life to politics."
In recent months, a pattern has emerged. Each time politics and money collide around Farage, a public relations crisis follows. After the standards inquiry began over the undeclared £5 million gift, Farage resigned his Clacton-on-Sea parliamentary seat and then announced he would run for the same seat again.
In a video statement, he said: "The people of Clacton can choose to back me, or they can back the establishment."
Mainstream parties barely responded. None fielded a candidate, leaving his only real opponent as Count Binface, a comedian who wears a bin on his head and claims to be from outer space. Farage won easily, but the summer spectacle still damaged Reform UK’s polling.
Channel 4 fallout led to resignations
Channel 4 later aired undercover footage arranged by the investigative firm Verbatim. In the recording, an actor posing as an American donor discussed a poll measuring support for British parties with Farage. Channel 4 said the poll had been commissioned by Reform UK but funded by a U.S. company. If that poll is treated as overseas support received by a political party, it could breach British donation rules.
Farage’s verdict on the poll was blunt: "It’s brilliant, very good value for money."
He later said he had not been paying proper attention during that part of the conversation. After the program aired, two senior aides resigned. Reform UK denied any wrongdoing and said an internal inquiry found the poll had been commissioned by aides personally rather than by the party.
The report says Reform UK’s support began to slip after the by-election turmoil and the Channel 4 revelations. Once former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham became prime minister, Labour’s numbers rose.
Against that backdrop, the arrival of almost $100 million shifted the conversation from Reform UK being politically damaged to Reform UK being financially formidable.
Both donors have strong overseas ties
The money also creates a political vulnerability. Farage says Reform UK speaks for ordinary people, yet the two men bankrolling the party are billionaires with careers largely built abroad.
Delo said he specifically returned to Britain so he could donate to Reform UK without restriction. Ben Habib, the party’s former deputy leader and now a critic of Farage, said courting overseas billionaires was no different from courting outsiders in other forms.
"Apart from crypto-related provisions, almost none of Farage’s policies will affect these two men," Habib said. "Yet they are influencing the direction of British politics and how the country is governed. I think that is deeply unhealthy."
How Harborne became a major Tether shareholder
Harborne rarely appears in public. Much of what is known about him comes from a 2024 defamation lawsuit he filed over a Wall Street Journal article that, he said, falsely implied he had taken part in efforts by crypto firms to mislead banks.
He previously worked as a McKinsey consultant, moved to Thailand in the 1990s and built an aviation fuel business there. The turning point in his fortune came after the 2016 Bitfinex hack. Harborne was trading on the exchange at the time. Users affected by the breach received dollar-denominated BFX tokens. While many sold, Harborne bought heavily, later converted the tokens into equity and, through later transactions, ended up with about a 12% stake in Tether.
Tether is now valued at $183 billion, and Harborne’s holding is about 12%. In the defamation filings, he said he has never held any management role at Tether.
Carol Alexander, a finance professor at the University of Sussex, said: "He was simply at the center of a huge enterprise at exactly the right moment." She added: "It was extremely risky, and it could easily have ended very differently."
Harborne barely uses social media and has never given a long-form interview or appeared on a podcast. One of the few public audio clips comes from a talk at his Thai retreat, Kamalaya. Sitting at a table in a shirt and speaking calmly, he said: "At Kamalaya, we try to help every guest make one small change each time they visit. Just one small change is enough."
The Guardian cited remarks from the same setting in which Harborne said that in his 40s he worked 18 hours a day and lived on chocolate milk and biscuits. Around that period, a two-seater plane he was flying crashed into the garden of a couple in Hampshire. The homeowners were not injured.
His politics are hard to place neatly. In opinion pieces, he has said little about borders or immigration and instead pointed to artificial intelligence, nuclear war and climate change as his main concerns. As for the £5 million gift, he said the impulse dated back to 2019, when a protester threw a banana milkshake at Farage during a campaign event in Newcastle.
That attack, he said, made him decide that he would protect Nigel "not just now, but for the rest of my life."
After the gift became public, Farage was asked on a radio show what the money was for. He replied: "What if I want to buy a Ferrari with it? Can’t I?"
Delo’s BitMEX history and political agenda
Delo grew up in Oxford. The report says he was asked to leave three schools while in primary education, including once for vandalizing a teachers’ bathroom. At 11, he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, which he said made it hard for him to read social cues. In 2005, he graduated from Oxford and attended a formal dinner wearing a wetsuit under his white tie, arguing that the rules required formal dress but did not specify more than that.
British media have often described him as the country’s youngest self-made billionaire, though his exact net worth is difficult to pin down. After working at JPMorgan in Hong Kong, he co-founded crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX in 2014.
Six years later, U.S. prosecutors accused BitMEX of deliberately failing to build an adequate anti-money laundering and customer identification program. In February 2022, Delo pleaded guilty to one count under the Bank Secrecy Act and agreed to pay a $10 million fine. Four months later, he received a 30-month probation sentence.
In March 2025, President Trump granted him a full pardon. In a statement, Delo said: "Today, a legal wrong has been corrected. I am pleased to clear my name, lift the burden of an unjust conviction, and continue with my life and charitable work."
After the pardon, Delo stepped up philanthropy. According to the report, he has given more than $100 million to causes including autism research and his Oxford alma mater. One of his most talked-about projects is The Sanctuary, housed in a neo-Gothic building near Westminster Abbey and positioned somewhere between a co-working space and a private members’ club. There is no sign outside, and members are told not to photograph the interior.
Harry Shukman of the British investigative group Hope Not Hate visited the venue and described "Chesterfield leather sofas, ancient tapestries showing medieval scenes, champagne, Fabergé eggs, and a stuffed penguin. There is also a map of St Helena, where Napoleon was exiled."
The Sanctuary regularly hosts events featuring right-wing academics, podcasters and politicians opposed to "woke" culture. Guests have included Rupert Lowe, founder of Restore Britain, a party positioned to the right of Reform UK.
Speaking by phone, Lowe said of Delo: "I think he is worried about the direction Britain is heading in and is trying, in the way he thinks best, to do what he can to change it. I think he is a very fine man."
In his own article, Delo said he had "left the crypto industry" and that the donation was not about making more money. What matters to him, he wrote, is defeating political correctness, which he has described as "a totalitarian ideology that is strangling our society."
He cast Reform UK as the only party capable of fighting that enemy. Delo compared Reform to a startup facing centuries-old incumbents. "One reason established parties endure for so long is that they raise the cost of challenging them," he wrote. "I want to see a fair fight, on a level playing field."
Whether Reform UK keeps the money may be decided later
Reform UK now plans to hire as many as 400 campaign managers in target constituencies across the country. Farage has also said he wants to build "the strongest research and policy team in British political history."
That depends on whether the party can keep the money.
In March this year, Labour introduced legislation that would cap political donations from British citizens living abroad, or those who have only recently returned, at £100,000 a year. The bill would apply retroactively from March 25. If it becomes law, it could trigger large-scale clawbacks. If Delo and Harborne were resident overseas before that cutoff, Reform UK may have to return almost all of the £72 million involved.
That is why the men’s residency status has become a matter of national interest. Reform deputy leader Richard Tice told the BBC: "We are satisfied that, under both current law and the proposed legislation, they are fully compliant."
The bill is expected to move through the House of Lords in the coming months, but the final fate of the crypto-funded donations will likely be settled in court.
Farage also faces another threat. Reports say the standards commissioner’s findings are due soon, and if the outcome goes against him, a recall petition could follow. That would force him to contest the Clacton-on-Sea seat for a third time.
Alastair Campbell, the podcaster and former press secretary to Prime Minister Tony Blair, said: "There is no doubt these scandals have damaged him." He added that Farage wants the public to treat such episodes the way Trump’s supporters often do: as part of the package. In that view, people end up saying, "Yes, that’s Nigel. But honestly, all politicians are dirty."
