{"id":917412,"date":"2026-04-25T10:36:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T10:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/917412\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T10:36:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T10:36:14","slug":"nigel-is-mad-to-accept-his-money-who-is-christopher-harborne-the-mystery-billionaire-bankrolling-reform-reform-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/917412\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Nigel is mad to accept his money\u2019: who is Christopher Harborne, the mystery billionaire bankrolling Reform? | Reform UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shortly before Christmas 2022, Chakrit Sakunkrit, owner of the Kamalaya Wellness Sanctuary on the Thai island of Koh Samui, invited 200\u00a0guests to spend a few days celebrating his 60th birthday. One sultry afternoon, Sakunkrit and a small group gathered around a table near the shore, surrounded by the burgundy foliage of Good Luck plants. To his right, dressed down in a\u00a0polo\u00a0shirt, sat Nigel Farage<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since Brexit marked the achievement of his life\u2019s work three years earlier, Farage had fizzled. Even some of his supporters had pronounced him finished. Now,\u00a0with the Conservatives<\/a> in disarray after Liz Truss\u2019s\u00a0disastrous budget that September, Farage was hinting at a still more ambitious project: to make himself prime minister.<\/p>\n

In the talks he hosts for paying guests at Kamalaya, Sakunkrit\u2019s topics are micronutrients or Tibetan bells<\/a>. Once, he recounted a brush with mortality<\/a> in his late\u00a040s. \u201cI was eating and drinking chocolate milk, cookies, to give me energy during the day to work 18\u00a0hours per day, day after day after day,\u201d he said. Now, in his measured, soothing voice, he muses about living to 120.<\/p>\n

Sakunkrit speaks perfect English. In fact, he is English. He chose a Thai name (Chakrit means he who is awake, or the watchful one) when he naturalised there in 2011. It appears on some of his business filings. On others, he goes by the name he was born with in Mosborough, a village near Sheffield, on 18 December 1962: Christopher Charles Sherriff Harborne.<\/p>\n

Over the past seven years, Harborne has given more than \u00a322m<\/a> to Farage\u2019s political party. That accounts for two-thirds of all funding received by Reform UK (previously called the Brexit party), making it uniquely dependent among British parties on a single benefactor. August\u2019s \u00a39m was the largest single amount ever given by a living donor. Another \u00a33m followed in November.<\/p>\n

At the time of the Thailand meeting just over three\u00a0years ago, the idea of Farage becoming prime\u00a0minister would have been laughable to many. Today, his war chest for May\u2019s crunch local elections overflowing with Harborne\u2019s cash, Farage\u2019s party is the bookmakers\u2019 favourite to win the most seats at the next general election.<\/p>\n

Harborne is, his lawyers say<\/a>, an \u201cintensely private person\u201d. He has given no public explanation of his reasons for donating. Asked in December about his\u00a0donations, Farage said<\/a>, \u201cDoes he want anything from me? No. Absolutely nothing in return at all. He\u00a0just\u00a0happens to think that we\u2019ve not made the most\u00a0of Brexit, that we\u2019re not getting into the 21st-century technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n

One 21st-century technology in particular has turbocharged Harborne\u2019s wealth: cryptocurrency. He was an early buyer of digital tokens that have soared in value. And he is one of half a dozen enigmatic tech types who own Tether, the company that issues the most widely traded cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n

Registered in the Central American dictatorship of El\u00a0Salvador, with a tiny staff, Tether has been described as the most profitable company per employee in history<\/a>. It has issued $184bn in digital cash known as stablecoins<\/a>. They have grown popular as a way to move money across borders, and in places where inflation erodes the value of local currency. But billions of Tether\u2019s stablecoins are also known to have been put to illicit purposes by gangsters, scammers, Russian sanctions-busters, North Korean hackers and others who would rather avoid the scrutiny of moving money via a bank.<\/p>\n

Yet Farage champions Tether. \u201cTether is a stablecoin,\u201d Farage said on LBC radio<\/a> in September, the month after Harborne\u2019s record donation. \u201cStablecoins are the way which money goes from conventional currencies through into cryptocurrencies and back again. Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company.\u201d<\/p>\n

He went on: \u201cStablecoins, crypto, this world is enormous, and I\u2019ve been urging for years that London should embrace it. We should become a global trading centre for this stuff.\u201d He called for \u201cproper regulation\u201d but then said he would be seeing the Bank of England\u2019s governor to demand he scrap a proposed cap on stablecoin ownership that had led \u201csome of my friends\u201d to consider emigrating. \u201cWhy is the bank so out of touch? Why is it behaving like a dinosaur? Why not get with the 21st century? These new technologies aren\u2019t going away. They\u2019re here.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Farage helps Tether become a $500bn company \u2013 worth more than Mastercard and nearly twice as much\u00a0as HSBC \u2013 it will make the proprietor of the Kamalaya Wellness Sanctuary one of the richest people on the\u00a0planet.<\/p>\n

The Harbornes have English heritage of the kind Farage and part of his base cherish. Christopher\u2019s ancestor RC Sherriff wrote the wartime dramas The\u00a0Dam\u00a0Busters and Journey\u2019s End.<\/p>\n

Harborne appears to have taken after his mother in temperament and his father in profession. Mark Vellacott, an aerospace businessman, close friend of Harborne\u2019s late sister Katharine, and candidate for Reform in the local elections, tells me about the family. He describes Joan as a resilient Yorkshirewoman from a well-off background who kept the home steady, in contrast to the quick\u2011tempered Edgar, an insurance investor. Harborne, the middle of their three children, is\u00a0level, gentle and extremely clever, Vellacott says. \u201cChris does not like anything that\u2019s going to control him.\u201d<\/p>\n

After private school at Westminster, Harborne followed his father to Cambridge, where he studied engineering and rowed for his college. He proceeded to the McKinsey management consultancy, a prestigious French business school, and senior positions at multinationals such as PepsiCo. Arriving in Thailand in 1996, Harborne joined a market research firm owned by a member of the powerful Bulakul family. He came across as \u201cbright but a bit odd and intense\u201d, according to\u00a0one account of him from those days. The Asian financial crisis struck in 1997. Like crises before and since, it was a bonanza for those who made the right bets. Harborne did well enough that, in 2000, he set up on his own, founding an investment firm called Sherriff Global.<\/p>\n

double quotation mark<\/p>\n

Harborne\u2019s not a person who can accept stability. He\u2019s a breaker<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The following year he made his first political donation: \u00a310,000 to the Conservatives. Harborne\u2019s lawyers have said, in court filings, that he has given money to a variety of causes: victims of the 2004 tsunami, a blockchain research institute, remote Thai tribes for whom he bought books. They added that \u201cmany of his business activities and investments flow from his passion for aviation\u201d. In 2005, he founded AML\u00a0Global, a jet fuel broker that operates at more than 1,200 locations worldwide.<\/p>\n

Marriage and fatherhood did not dim his love of flying, even in high winds. An episode from 2008 suggests a man who may feel that rules \u2013 even those of nature \u2013 are for other people. Harborne took off from Hertfordshire in his lightweight two-seater and made for the Hampshire village of Highclere. Twice, strong gusts forced him to divert. On the third attempt to land, the plane crashed into Frank <\/strong>and Jacki Seymour\u2019s patio. They were out. \u201cWe could easily have been in the garden and been killed,\u201d Frank, 60, told a reporter. \u201cIt was a\u00a0very lucky escape.\u201d Harborne was helped from the wreckage by the Seymours\u2019 neighbours and airlifted to hospital with serious head injuries and broken ribs. (Farage, by coincidence, survived a small -plane crash two years later.)<\/p>\n

As Harborne recovered, a crash of a different sort was unfolding. Northern Rock had gone bust; Lehman Brothers soon followed. Homeowners were evicted, banks were bailed out, and revulsion at self-serving financial elites suffused the public mood. In the heat of the crisis, a coder going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published his invention<\/a>. \u201cA purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwould allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.\u201d He called it bitcoin.<\/p>\n

Cryptocurrency can seem forbiddingly complex but is essentially simple. You own a bitcoin if you hold the encryption key that verifies it. How many everyone has is recorded on the blockchain, basically a\u00a0spreadsheet. How much they are worth depends, like the value of stocks or paintings, on what someone is willing to pay for them.<\/p>\n

Harborne revealed details of his crypto interests in a defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over a story about his role in Tether. He started buying bitcoin in 2011, the suit says. By 2014, the price had risen a thousandfold. That year, Harborne became a\u00a0\u201cwhale\u201d \u2013 a major trader \u2013 in a new cryptocurrency on Ethereum, a platform devised by a Russian-Canadian teenager, Vitalik Buterin. Harborne\u2019s \u201cearly investment in Ethereum now accounts for a major portion of his net worth\u201d, the suit says.<\/p>\n

While sceptics say crypto trading is, at best, a new form of gambling and, at worst, a means for insiders to rip off the gullible and the desperate, proponents speak of digital currency as the gateway to liberation. Though the rhetoric chimes with that of self-styled rebels like Farage, for years he paid crypto little heed. He had been a trader in physical commodities and his image was decidedly analogue: fags, pints, the past. Then something changed.<\/p>\n

Reform has become the first UK party to accept crypto donations<\/a>, drafted legislation to cut taxes on crypto profits and proposed that the Treasury hold a\u00a0crypto reserve. Farage has said he wants to \u201cbring crypto in from the cold\u201d. Recently, he invested \u00a3215,000 in a\u00a0crypto venture<\/a> run by Truss\u2019s shortlived chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng. For a fee, he has plugged obscure cryptocurrencies<\/a> on the video site Cameo.<\/p>\n

\u201cI led a political insurgency, I took on the establishment,\u201d Farage told a bitcoin conference in Amsterdam<\/a> shortly before his 2022 trip to Thailand. \u201cThis is an economic insurgency and it\u2019s being driven and led by people who are worried about the sheer size, scale of big government, and, hey, they want to be free, they want to be independent, masters of their own destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation mark<\/p>\n

I asked Harborne about the timing of his donations. His lawyers said connections should not be drawn between their dates and \u2018unrelated events\u2019, without elaborating<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I want to know the origin of Farage\u2019s crypto enthusiasm. A Reform representative tells me, \u201cMr\u00a0Farage\u2019s support of cryptocurrencies came as a\u00a0result of him being debanked.\u201d That does not seem to make sense. Coutts made the decision to close Farage\u2019s accounts in November 2022. By then, he had been promoting crypto for at least two years<\/a>. During the pandemic in 2020, Farage told followers of his Fortune & Freedom investment newsletter that bitcoin was \u201cthe ultimate anti-lockdown investment\u201d.<\/p>\n

Gawain Towler spent years as Farage\u2019s communications chief and sits on Reform\u2019s board. I\u00a0ask him whether Farage\u2019s interest in crypto began with his debanking.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d says Towler. \u201cFar prior to\u00a0that.\u201d\u00a0He\u00a0believes it dates back to early 2019 \u2013 when Harborne arrived on the scene.<\/p>\n

Those were the tense months when both leavers and remainers still believed they could prevail. Harborne had given the Tories a total of \u00a3200,000 over two decades. Now flush with crypto money, he handed over that amount in one go to what had hitherto been a\u00a0hastily launched shambles. More money came in from a couple of other big contributors plus a rush of small online donations.<\/p>\n

The next month, the Brexit party came first in the UK\u2019s European parliament elections with 32% of the\u00a0vote. That helped sink Theresa May, already wounded by her failure to clinch a Brexit deal. In July, Harborne gave the party \u00a31m. Two more \u00a31m donations followed in August. He suggested trying to conjure the image of a broader donor base by sending \u00a350,000 via a proxy, though this did not go ahead<\/a>. Harborne gave another \u00a36.5m in his own name after Boris Johnson, May\u2019s successor in No 10, called a snap election.<\/p>\n

Harborne took a desk in the Brexit party\u2019s campaign headquarters. He brought in four screens for crypto business and a fridge for gin and tonics. \u201cHe sat in the office doing his blockchain weirdness,\u201d says Towler, who found him charming and diffident.<\/p>\n

I ask Towler why he thinks Harborne wanted to be there. \u201cHe was excited by it. He was interested in it. He believed in the basic premise that Britain should govern itself. But his involvement in the party was sitting there and watching us working our fucking socks off and enjoying the banter, the thinking and all the rest of it.\u201d He adds, \u201cI never heard him say, \u2018And I want you to have this policy.\u2019 Because, you\u2019ve got to remember, the Brexit party had only one policy, and that was to have Brexit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In February 2020, with Brexit done, Harborne\u2019s donations stopped. A deadly new coronavirus was spreading fast. Harborne\u2019s sister, Katharine, had flown to his home town of Bangkok. A vibrant Conservative councillor and lifelong Eurosceptic, she had defected to the Brexit party and stood in the European elections. She missed out on a seat and had been diagnosed with late\u2011stage breast cancer. Trying all manner of conventional and alternative treatments, I was told that during her time in Thailand she visited a\u00a0wellness sanctuary on Koh Samui \u2013 Kamalaya, the one her brother went on to buy.<\/p>\n

Christopher Harborne and, his late sister, Katharine, at Wimbledon. Photograph: Emma Nicholson<\/p>\n

Katharine died in 2021. Emma Nicholson, a\u00a0Conservative peer, gave the eulogy at her funeral. Over a slice of Earl Grey cake in the House of Lords tea room, Nicholson tells me that she met Harborne through her friendship with Katharine. \u201cHe\u2019s good\u2011looking, attractive, lots of excitements in his head.\u201d He took them to Wimbledon to watch the tennis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Conservative party worked hard to cultivate his donations,\u201d Nicholson says. \u201cBut he\u2019s not a person who can accept stability. He\u2019s a breaker.\u201d She goes on, \u201cI think Nigel is mad to accept his money.<\/p>\n

In the LBC radio interview championing Tether, Farage explained<\/a> that stablecoins are popular because they are used to convert money between crypto and conventional currencies issued by nation states.<\/p>\n

Harborne\u2019s own view, set out in his lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, is that stablecoins may fulfil cryptocurrency\u2019s potential \u201cto enable international transfers that, without bank fees and bureaucratic red\u00a0tape, are both immediate and frictionless\u201d.<\/p>\n

The value of bitcoin and others like it seesaws by the minute. Each Tether stablecoin is worth a dollar. Tether guarantees that by holding reserves containing one real dollar, or an asset worth one real dollar, for each stablecoin it issues. Or so it says.<\/p>\n

Despite its $10bn annual profits \u2013 more than those of McDonald\u2019s \u2013 Tether has never published full accounts or an audit of its reserves. In its early days, mainstream banks declined its business. Tether\u2019s founder, Giancarlo Devasini, is a reclusive Italian former plastic surgeon<\/a> who struck a plea bargain on a 1995 software piracy charge. When the crypto writer Zeke Faux sought an interview, Devasini replied, \u201cBees don\u2019t waste their time explaining to flies that honey is better than shit.\u201d Tether did not respond to my request for comment.<\/p>\n

Harborne is not just a major user<\/a> of Tether\u2019s stablecoins. Although, as his lawyers stress, he is not an executive, he has joined Devasini and two others whom leaked documents<\/a> have identified as the company\u2019s main owners, with a 12% stake. Harborne achieved this by snapping up tokens \u2013 effectively shares \u2013 issued to him and other users of an exchange called Bitfinex, Tether\u2019s sister company, to compensate them for crypto that hackers stole in 2016<\/a>.<\/p>\n

double quotation mark<\/p>\n

More episodes of Tether\u2019s stablecoins\u2019 nefarious uses were coming to light, not just by organised crime and scammers but reportedly by Hamas and pariah regimes like those in Iran and Venezuela<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Tether issued more and more of its stablecoins, questions about whether it really had the reserves to back up their value grew louder. In 2018, as the total in circulation passed $2bn, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, issued subpoenas<\/a> to Tether and Bitfinex. She suspected their bosses had been diverting large sums from Tether\u2019s reserves.<\/p>\n

By the time James announced a\u00a0fraud investigation into Tether in April 2019, Harborne had wired his first donation to Farage\u2019s party.<\/p>\n

I asked Harborne about the timing of his donations. His lawyers said connections should not be drawn between their dates and \u201cunrelated events\u201d, without elaborating. Harborne does have a political agenda, says Vellacott, the businessman who knows the family. But he also wants to be \u201cking of crypto\u201d. Vellacott tells me, \u201cWhen I see Chris involved in UK politics, I think it\u2019s with an eye to the opportunity to influence where crypto is going in the country and globally.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2019, almost \u00a33.5m of his donations to the Brexit party came after Farage had been outmanoeuvred by Boris Johnson and opted to stand down most of his candidates. The party slumped to 2% of the vote and won no seats, whereupon Harborne sent nearly half a\u00a0million more.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the timing of a series of large donations to the Conservative party seems odd. There was \u00a3500,000 in February 2022, just after the Metropolitan police launched its investigation into Johnson\u2019s Partygate lockdown breaches. Then the same amount on 6 May<\/a>, as the Tories lost 500 councillors in local elections. And again in September, the week after Truss\u2019s fiscal meltdown. In November, Harborne transferred \u00a31m to\u00a0Johnson\u2019s private office<\/a>, his premiership having ended in disgrace.<\/p>\n

There does, though, appear to be a pattern. Some big beneficiaries of Harborne\u2019s largesse have undergone conversions to the crypto cause. Even if he did not seek a quid pro quo, they adopted policy positions that align with his interests.<\/p>\n

Johnson has said he \u201csuspected from the outset that all cryptocurrencies were basically a Ponzi scheme\u201d, yet he became a noisy crypto booster as prime minister. During the three months between Harborne\u2019s first and second \u00a3500,000 Tory donations in 2022,\u00a0Johnson\u2019s\u00a0government announced measures to\u00a0make the UK \u201ca global hub for cryptoasset technology and investment\u201d. Top of the list was a plan for stablecoins like Tether\u2019s to become a recognised form of payment. (A Conservative spokesperson said, \u201cDonations to the party were not a material consideration in policy decisions.\u201d)<\/p>\n

When Rishi Sunak became prime minister on 25\u00a0October 2022, he gave every indication of perpetuating the party\u2019s evangelism for digital currencies, having fronted the pro-crypto policy as chancellor. But the following week, the CoinDesk site published an article<\/a> suggesting that the billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried\u2019s empire might largely rest on \u201cprinted\u2011out-of-thin-air\u201d crypto. As it became clear that $8bn of customers\u2019 money was missing, his FTX exchange collapsed, sending crypto prices tumbling.<\/p>\n

Bankman-Fried, a geeky Californian who had only recently been proclaiming from his $35m Bahamian penthouse that he sought riches merely to fund \u201ceffective altruism\u201d, was heading for a 25-year sentence in a US prison for fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and other crimes. The Economist\u2019s cover declared \u201cCrypto\u2019s downfall<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Labour taunted Sunak. \u201cThe Conservatives\u2019 wild\u00a0west approach to crypto has put millions of people\u2019s savings at risk and crypto-related crime in the UK \u2013 such as fraud and money laundering \u2013 is now at record levels,\u201d said Tulip Siddiq<\/a>, then a shadow Treasury minister.<\/p>\n

Farage remained a crypto guy (though Reform\u2019s representative insists that \u201cno donor, including Mr Harborne, has sought or been offered any form of influence, benefit or preferential treatment in connection with donations\u201d). More than a year had passed since he quit frontline politics. He was still honorary president of his party, renamed Reform UK<\/a>, but it was polling as low as 4% and needed loans from its new leader, the property developer Richard Tice, to stay alive. In the days before FTX collapsed, Farage had been at the Amsterdam bitcoin conference excoriating \u201cthe establishment\u201d for trying to thwart crypto\u2019s rise. Now he had another flight to catch \u2013 to Thailand.<\/p>\n

One of Kamalaya\u2019s paying guests was taken aback, even uncomfortable, to see the figurehead of the British right among them. \u201cI felt like I\u2019d entered some Tory private club in the home counties,\u201d the guest tells me.<\/p>\n

The sanctuary was changing as Harborne took over from the founders. They would soon depart, telling a spa industry publication they had \u201ccome to the conclusion that our business and wellness philosophies vis a\u00a0vis those of the controlling shareholders are simply divergent and incompatible\u201d.<\/p>\n

Guests with bookings in December 2022 received an apologetic email from the management warning them that the sanctuary would be busier than usual due to the birthday celebrations. Those who declined the offer of alternative dates witnessed Harborne\u2019s clique making themselves at home.<\/p>\n

Farage and his entourage eschewed the extensive juice menu, the guest recalls, opening a few bottles of wine one lunchtime instead. (The Reform representative disputed this, saying that \u201cas a wellness retreat\u201d Kamalaya does not permit drinking, though its website says fine wines with low alcohol content are available<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

An event management company seemed to be making a film about Harborne, to be shown on the final night of the festivities. For one scene, the guest tells me, Harborne was filmed by the pool posing as a\u00a0barefoot James Bond in black tie holding what looked like a martini, presumably shaken, not stirred.<\/p>\n

When Harborne sat down with Farage at the shoreside table, they were joined by Farage\u2019s pollster Chris Bruni\u2011Lowe and a couple: George Cottrell, known in Reform circles as Posh George, and his sometime girlfriend, the reality television personality Georgia Toffolo. So constant is Cottrell\u2019s presence in Farage\u2019s life that the politician is said to treat the young aristocrat like a son. Cottrell\u2019s mother dated then-Prince Charles in the 1970s. In 2024-25, she gave Reform \u00a3750,000<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 2022 Kamalaya gathering \u2013 seated, from right, Nigel Farage, Harborne, unidentified man, Georgia Toffolo, Chris Bruni-Lowe and George Cottrell<\/p>\n

Cottrell spent eight months in a US prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud in the context of a\u00a0money \u2011laundering conspiracy. Now he passes much of\u00a0his time in Montenegro, a regular at the casino in Tivat<\/a>. He has been alleged in court papers \u2013 which his lawyers dispute \u2013 to have a \u201cfinancial interest\u201d in Tether.bet<\/a>, a\u00a0gambling site for users of the cryptocurrency. When, six months after the Thai gathering, Harborne set up a new company called Longevity Biotech Systems, he incorporated it not in Thailand but Tivat, at the address of Cottrell\u2019s local lawyer. (Cottrell\u2019s London lawyers told me the one in Montenegro has lots of other clients, too.)<\/p>\n

Reform\u2019s representative warned me not to read too much into the Kamalaya gathering. \u201cIt was just a\u00a0birthday party,\u201d they said. \u201cAny attempt to characterise this event as giving rise to, or evidencing, any form of coordination or alignment between Mr Harborne and Reform UK or Mr Farage is entirely unfounded,\u201d the representative added, threatening legal action if I did so.<\/p>\n

The Reform representative pointed out that Farage had retired from frontline politics the previous year and said he was not at the time \u201ccontemplating a\u00a0return of the kind suggested and it was a number of important years before he even considered doing so\u201d. Yet Farage had contemplated a return in a Daily Telegraph column published days before he went to Thailand. He reminded readers that Tice was Reform\u2019s leader and he was only honorary president, but took it upon himself to announce that the party would field a full slate of candidates at the next general election.<\/p>\n

With the Conservatives imploding post-Truss, Farage had accused the \u201cGoldman Sachs globalist\u201d Sunak of betraying Brexit. Citing polling showing popular support for a \u201cFarage-led party\u201d, he ended his column: \u201cWhether I take a more active role in Reform\u00a0UK in future will depend on the extent of the betrayal of Brexit. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, I didn\u2019t spend 25 years of my life battling to secure a seemingly hopeless cause only to watch [then chancellor of the exchequer] Jeremy Hunt give it away.\u201d Within a year and a half, Farage would formally be leader once more.<\/p>\n

Harborne\u2019s donations to the Conservatives had ceased by the Kamalaya meeting but he maintained his relationship with Johnson, Farage\u2019s great rival as Brexit standard-bearer. In September 2023, Harborne accompanied Johnson on a trip to Ukraine<\/a>. Quite why is unclear, although Harborne does have experience in military matters: his jet fuel venture makes millions from\u00a0Pentagon contracts and he holds a stake in QinetiQ, the privatised weapons-research arm of the UK\u2019s armed forces.<\/p>\n

Boris Johnson in Ukraine with Harborne (hands in lap) in 2023<\/p>\n

None of Harborne\u2019s money flowed to Reform in the run-up to the 2024 general election, as Keir Starmer returned Labour to power. Nonetheless, at the eighth attempt, Farage won a seat in the Commons as MP for Clacton. Soon he was back on the road, flying to the US to appear at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. After surviving an assassination attempt by the width of an ear, Donald Trump was to accept the party\u2019s nomination for president.<\/p>\n

Farage declared the trip\u2019s purpose as \u201cto support a\u00a0friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage\u201d. When his entry on the register of MPs\u2019 interests was published, it showed that the \u00a332,000 cost of flights and accommodation for him and a staffer had been paid by Harborne. For the first time since Brexit, Harborne was once again putting his money behind Farage. It may yet carry him all the way to Downing Street.<\/p>\n

The luminaries of the transatlantic right who assembled on a Washington DC hotel rooftop for Trump\u2019s second inauguration in January 2025 hoped, one remarked, to be gathering again soon \u201cto celebrate Nigel Farage becoming the prime minister of Great Britain\u201d.<\/p>\n

Harborne paid the \u00a327,000 cost of Farage\u2019s trip to DC<\/a>. For once, they attended the same public event: the Stars and Stripes Union Jack reception, at which Farage was guest of honour. (That is rare. There are no publicly available images of Farage and Harborne together. The grainy photographs of them at Kamalaya are the first.)<\/p>\n

The inauguration party was a triumph not just for the right but for crypto. Indeed, the two have long been entangled. Another partygoer, the Maga agitator and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, has declared cryptocurrency \u201cthe future\u201d and promoted one called Patriot Pay (some buyers are now suing him<\/a>). He has collaborated with Brock Pierce, a child movie star who was involved in the conception of Tether\u2019s stablecoin.<\/p>\n

Under Joe Biden, the justice department had taken on the industry. Bankman-Fried was convicted. Others went to jail, too, or paid fines. Faced with this existential threat, the industry raised hundreds of millions for political donations, sums to match those spent by big\u00a0oil and Wall Street.<\/p>\n

Trump had once dismissed digital currencies as scams that were \u201cbased on thin air\u201d. Donations may have helped change his mind, plus his experience, like Farage, of being \u201cdebanked\u201d by mainstream financial institutions. During the campaign, Trump told a bitcoin conference in Nashville he wanted to make the US the \u201ccrypto capital of the planet\u201d. He vowed to remove the regulator who had led the crackdown. \u201cWe will have regulations,\u201d he told the crowd, \u201cbut from now on the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tether settled the New York fraud case in 2021 by paying a $18.5m fine<\/a> and undertaking not to trade in the state. But ever more episodes of its stablecoins\u2019 nefarious uses were coming to light, not just by organised crime and scammers but reportedly by Hamas and pariah regimes like those in Iran and Venezuela. On the eve of the election, it was reported that the US\u00a0Department of Justice had begun an investigation into Tether for possible violations of sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules. Tether executives were warned to avoid the US for fear of arrest.<\/p>\n

double quotation mark<\/p>\n

His wealth is tied to a cryptoasset that our law enforcement agencies have flagged as\u00a0a\u00a0tool used in Russia-linked illicit finance<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That US investigation, like many crypto cases, appears to have stopped since Trump returned to power. As a foreign company, Tether could not contribute to the industry\u2019s political spending. But it found an influential ally in Howard Lutnick, a Washington operator whose investment house held billions of Tether\u2019s lucrative reserves. Trump chose Lutnick to run his transition team \u2013 selecting, among others, those who would oversee the crypto industry \u2013 then appointed him secretary of commerce. Tether has been one of the donors to Trump\u2019s East Wing ballroom. When Bo Hines, Trump\u2019s crypto policy chief, left the White House last year, he took a job at Tether.<\/p>\n

The Trumps have launched their own crypto ventures. They now account for an estimated 90% of the family\u2019s ballooning income. Powerful figures from China, the Gulf and elsewhere who funnel money into them appear to have been rewarded with the administration\u2019s favour<\/a>, seemingly including a crypto tycoon granted a pardon. The Genius Act, regulating stablecoins, is regarded by critics as legislation Tether might as well have written itself.<\/p>\n

Karoline Leavitt, Trump\u2019s spokeswoman, tells me, \u201cThe media\u2019s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public\u2019s distrust in what they read.\u201d The president\u2019s crypto policies are \u201cdriving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n

As demand for Tether stablecoins grows, so do its reserves, and so does the interest and investment returns on those reserves. The company does not reveal how the profits are distributed, but if Harborne\u2019s share is equal to his stake, that would make him about $1bn a year.<\/p>\n

Although the blockchain logs transactions, it does not record users\u2019 names. This anonymity is the point of crypto for some. Harborne son\u2019s Will was Tether\u2019s 10th employee<\/a>, writing crucial code, and now runs a\u00a0stablecoin venture that started as part of Tether. Unlike his father, he has articulated his vision for digital money in public. In a 2019 interview, he criticised the systems banks use to check the identities of their customers. Rules, Will said, \u201cthat we all know and hate today in most western democracies\u201d. He objected to \u201cgiving away lots about our identities which isn\u2019t necessarily going to be kept safe, or used in ways that we want\u201d. Asked about this today, Will tells me his views have changed, adding that his goal for stablecoins is \u201cnot to replace the financial system overnight, but to improve how money moves\u201d.<\/p>\n

Experts say banks\u2019 systems are flawed and burdensome but that they can help stem illicit finance. One prominent voice on the risks of crypto is Richard Sanders, a US military veteran<\/a> who has developed sleuthing techniques that can sometimes pierce crypto\u2019s anonymity, allowing him to crack dozens of scams and hacks. He lives in Kyiv, working with Ukrainian intelligence and mapping worldwide networks of digital dirty money.<\/p>\n

Tether\u2019s stablecoins, Sanders believes, are used for much of the illicit activity in cryptocurrency. Its bosses have agreed to requests from law enforcement agencies to freeze stablecoins worth more than $3bn. \u201cWe are active players in the global fight against financial crime,\u201d its representative once told me, adding that, after it issues its currency, \u201cflows are not controlled by Tether but we remain vigilant and ready to act when law enforcement identifies illicit activity.\u201d Harborne\u2019s lawyers say neither he nor the company could be considered \u201cguilty of the alleged crimes perpetrated by unassociated random users of Tether\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sanders doesn\u2019t buy that. \u201cThey are responsible because they make money off it,\u201d he tells me. Sanders says he has held discussions with UK government officials about how Tether could be forced to freeze more of its stablecoins. And the UK\u2019s National Crime Agency has taken an interest in Tether. Recently, NCA investigators said they had rumbled a money-laundering scheme enabling \u201csanctions evasions and the highest levels of organised crime<\/a>\u201d that was helping the Russian war effort in Ukraine. The scheme, the investigators tell me, was running on Tether stablecoins.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Trump, Tether appears unlikely to face scrutiny from the US authorities. But its bosses, Sanders suggests, may \u201cfear a country like the UK stepping up in the US\u2019s absence\u201d.<\/p>\n

If Farage\u2019s prediction comes true \u2013 perhaps with his own assistance as prime minister \u2013 and Tether\u2019s valuation reaches half a trillion dollars, Harborne\u2019s stake in that company alone would make him something like the 30th richest person alive, with double the fortune of Google\u2019s Eric Schmidt or Harborne\u2019s fellow tech tycoon and rightwing donor Peter Thiel.<\/p>\n

Like Thiel, Harborne has lately displayed a readiness to intervene in global affairs. In February, he spent \u00a325,000 to fly Farage to the Maldives<\/a> as part of a failed attempt to reach the Chagos Islands military base. Farage opposes the government\u2019s proposed decision to hand sovereignty to Mauritius. It appears Harborne also may have helped organise a flight by a group of Chagossian campaigners to Sri Lanka before they set out for the islands by boat.<\/p>\n

Harborne does not give interviews. His lawyers at the London reputation-management firm Schillings said he would not \u201creward\u201d me for my prior coverage<\/a> by granting one. \u201cOur client has not sought to influence, nor has he influenced, any politician to\u00a0support cryptocurrencies or any other of his business interests,\u201d they wrote. \u201cThe\u00a0prime ministers and senior politicians to whom you refer are fully capable of making their own informed decisions on matters such as cryptocurrencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harborne does appear to believe that \u2013 on other occasions \u2013 he who pays the piper calls the tune. The lawyers said his sole on-record response to my questions was a line from the media critic Upton Sinclair: \u201cIt\u00a0is\u00a0difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.\u201d (The inference: my employer would not want me to treat him fairly.)<\/p>\n

In February, the Labour MP Phil Brickell used a\u00a0Commons debate about democracy to express concerns about the sources of Reform\u2019s funding. He said, \u201cLet me also mention Chakrit Sakunkrit \u2013 sound familiar? I can see blank faces around the chamber. I\u00a0will use his old name: Christopher Harborne.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brickell referred to the NCA\u2019s Russia investigation. \u201cThat is not to say that Harborne himself is complicit in any wrongdoing. But the fact is that we now have a\u00a0large political party bankrolled by an overseas billionaire whose wealth is tied to a cryptoasset that our own law enforcement agencies have flagged as a tool used in Russia-linked illicit finance.\u201d Brickell used to work at Barclays and NatWest running teams combatting corruption and money-laundering. \u201cLet\u00a0me\u00a0summarise what I have just said in six short words: red flag, red\u00a0flag,\u00a0red flag.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harborne\u2019s money may help Farage topple Starmer in the local elections as it helped him topple May six\u00a0years ago. As of last month, however, there is what looks like a concerted effort to limit how much more he can give. Starmer\u2019s government has announced a ban on donations over \u00a3100,000<\/a> by those who are otherwise eligible but live abroad. There are loopholes. Overseas donors can still give via UK companies. Harborne has at least two, but there are restrictions that could curb how much he can channel through them.<\/p>\n

Or he could come home. He still has family in the UK. Some are involved in politics. Harborne\u2019s daughter-in-law, Will\u2019s wife, Sophie, wants to run as a Liberal Democrat candidate for parliament \u2013 though she has left the family name off her website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For years, two people who know him tell me, Harborne was a non-dom. That meant he enjoyed a\u00a0special status allowing rich Britons to avoid UK tax\u00a0on\u00a0their foreign\u00a0earnings if they limit the number of\u00a0days they spend in\u00a0the country each year. Harborne is said to have\u00a0taken\u00a0great care not to exceed his quota\u00a0and trigger\u00a0a tax bill. As a non\u2011dom, Harborne might have been able to get round the foreign donor\u00a0rules. But\u00a0Labour scrapped the non-dom regime\u00a0last year. So it seems that if he wants to go on backing Farage as\u00a0lavishly as\u00a0he\u00a0has been, Harborne will\u00a0have to be\u00a0willing to live\u00a0in\u00a0the country whose fate he is shaping,\u00a0even if it means handing some of his fortune to the public purse.<\/p>\n

Another expat billionaire this month announced he was going back to the UK to fund Farage. Ben Delo has given \u00a34m this year<\/a> already but would have been prevented from giving further such sums had he stayed in Hong Kong. \u201cLabour seems antagonised by one man in particular: Christopher Harborne,\u201d Delo wrote in the Daily Telegraph<\/a>. \u201cFor Labour, sitting on its cushion of trade union funding, the idea that someone might create a level playing field by giving Reform as much money to spend as the other parties is intolerable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Delo\u2019s wealth, like Harborne\u2019s, comes from crypto. In\u00a02022 he pleaded guilty to violating the US Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement adequate anti\u00a0money-laundering controls on his crypto exchange. Trump pardoned him last year. Now Delo wants others with such riches to unite. \u201cLet\u2019s build a war chest,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand win back our country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Navaon Siradapuvadol in Bangkok and Rowena Mason and Henry Dyer in London<\/p>\n

Get in touch<\/p>\n

Contact Tom Burgis about this story<\/p>\n

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