{"id":693362,"date":"2026-07-15T17:27:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T17:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/693362\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T17:27:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T17:27:16","slug":"bank-of-england-governor-would-have-put-off-farage-meeting-had-5m-gift-been-under-investigation-nigel-farage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/693362\/","title":{"rendered":"Bank of England governor would have put off Farage meeting had \u00a35m gift been under investigation | Nigel Farage"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Bank of England governor has said he would have put off a meeting with Nigel Farage last autumn<\/a> had the Reform UK leader\u2019s \u00a35m gift from a crypto billionaire been under investigation at the time.<\/p>\n

Andrew Bailey said he did not regret meeting Farage to discuss the Bank\u2019s plans for cryptocurrency regulation last September, months before the controversial donation from the Thailand-based investor Christopher Harborne was revealed by the Guardian in April.<\/a><\/p>\n

However, Bailey said he would have considered delaying the meeting had the central bank known what it knows today: that a parliamentary inquiry would be launched over the undisclosed gift from Farage\u2019s wealthy benefactor, who has made a large part of his estimated \u00a318bn fortune from crypto.<\/p>\n

In an interview with the Guardian, Bailey said: \u201cWhether I would have then said: \u2018Well, I think we\u2019d better wait until the investigation is done before we have the meeting\u2019 \u2013 I think that would be a judgment we would have taken at the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would have been a material fact, certainly, in our judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bailey, who also serves as head of the international watchdog the Financial Stability Board, has previously assured that he is \u201cable to spot\u201d and resist lobbying and did not bow to Farage.<\/p>\n

Farage has said he used the meeting in September to demand the Bank of England<\/a> drop plans for a state-issued rival to a stablecoin issued by Tether. Harborne, who has provided two-thirds of Reform UK\u2019s funding, appears to make as much as \u00a31bn a year from his shareholding in Tether.<\/p>\n

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies whose value is typically pegged to an asset or a currency such as the US dollar and tend to be used as an intermediary between state currency and crypto transactions.<\/p>\n

Farage has also said he urged Bailey to abandon plans for a cap on how many stablecoins individuals in the UK could own, which was eventually dropped by the Bank after a consultation. Bailey has defended those changes, saying it was easier to set caps on the total number of stablecoins issued, rather than policing individual holdings.<\/p>\n

The governor said it had been a \u201cperfectly polite exchange of views\u201d but that Farage\u2019s stance on the Bank was clear. \u201cHis argument, as I interpreted it, is that there is \u2018an establishment\u2019 and he presumably thinks that we\u2019re part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the Bank\u2019s latest rules on stablecoins such as Tether, Bailey said he had not discussed them with the Reform UK leader. \u201cI don\u2019t know where Nigel Farage<\/a> is on that, or where we have got to now \u2026 I haven\u2019t talked to him about it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been interested, with the release of our proposed rules, that one or two people who are criticising us for being dinosaurs have now sort of come out with rather grand statements the other way around, saying that we\u2019re great at innovation, which is quite amusing.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI do actually think we\u2019re encouraging innovation, so I think we are doing the right thing there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Farage has now been reported to the standards commissioner<\/a> over whether he lobbied the Bank against parliamentary rules. However, Bailey said the controversy over the meeting would not spark any change about how the Bank booked and conducted meetings with political figures, which it did regularly and without \u201cfavouritism\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople come in here and tell me and my colleagues things which are very market-sensitive. And we have a degree of confidentiality around it. So I\u2019m very keen that we preserve the fact that people can come into the Bank of England and tell us things and it doesn\u2019t immediately get on to the public record. I know that can sound difficult to say in the wrong circumstances, but it is important,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do have a responsibility as a public authority to be open to the leaders of parties in the Westminster system. I think that\u2019s fine. I think we must do that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Bank of England governor has said he would have put off a meeting with Nigel Farage last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-693362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693362","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=693362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}