{"id":559833,"date":"2026-05-01T03:12:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T03:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/559833\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T03:12:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T03:12:11","slug":"elections-watchdog-considers-looking-into-5m-donation-to-farage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/559833\/","title":{"rendered":"Elections watchdog considers looking into \u00a35m donation to Farage"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Conservatives say Reform UK was a private limited company at the time which Farage “owned”.<\/p>\n

Information held by Companies House shows that, from May 2021 until February 2025, Farage held between 50% and 75% of the shares in what was known at the time as Reform UK Party Limited.<\/p>\n

Farage is listed as a director and the nature of the company’s business as the “activities of political organisations”.<\/p>\n

The Conservatives have also written to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, to claim that Nigel Farage had broken the House of Commons Code of Conduct by “failing to register a political donation”.<\/p>\n

Mr Greenberg’s office would not comment.<\/p>\n

Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, defended Farage as “the highest profile British politician in recent decades” who deals with regular threats to his life.<\/p>\n

Asked whether Farage should have declared the money on BBC Question Time, Yusuf denied there was any reason to do so.<\/p>\n

He said: “That gift was an unconditional gift for Nigel’s private purposes, before he had even considered becoming an MP, let alone being an MP, so I’m afraid it’s simply not the case.”<\/p>\n

“There is clearly an insinuation that he has broken the rules,” he said, before quoting the House of Commons Register of MPs’ financial interests, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yusuf said it “makes crystal clear” that only money relating to business in the House of Commons should be registered.<\/p>\n

The full section in the rules states gifts and benefits do not need to be registered if they could not “reasonably be thought by others to be related to membership of the House or to the member’s parliamentary or political activities”.<\/p>\n

But it adds the possible motive of the giver and the use to which the gift is put should be considered and “if there is any doubt, the benefit should be registered”.<\/p>\n

All MPs must declare gifts, benefits or hospitality with a value of more than \u00a3300 for the 12 months prior to being elected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Conservatives say Reform UK was a private limited company at the time which Farage “owned”. Information held…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-559833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}