In the news report, an undercover investigator posing as the son of an American donor is recorded raising a concern that his father wouldn’t be able to directly donate to the party within the law.<\/p>\n
Electoral law states that to be a permissible donor to a UK political party you must be a UK registered voter, or a company registered in the UK.<\/p>\n
Jukes appears to suggest that the donation could be in the UK-based son’s name, although the money would have come from his American father.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere James Orr, the party’s head of policy suggests that the father could pay for opinion polling to support one of Reform’s campaigns.<\/p>\n
Farage and Jukes were also filmed at a lunch in Clacton where it is suggested the US donor, who was being played by an actor, gives \u00a3500,000 to Reform through his son.<\/p>\n
Farage told the BBC he “frankly wasn’t listening” to the discussion about the potential donation. Channel 4 News have said the payment was never made. <\/p>\n
He dismissed the comments made by his aide in the film as “loose pub talk including a couple of boasts that simply were not true”.<\/p>\n
Jukes has denied “any wrongdoing” and said he had “stepped back from politics in order to clear my name”.<\/p>\n
Last week, Orr told Sky News he would cooperate with the party’s internal investigation “fully”.<\/p>\n
The Met had already been investigating whether payments to Reform in the weeks before the last election complied with donation laws.<\/p>\n
The probe is examining donations given directly to the party by Fiona Cottrell, mother of longstanding Nigel Farage ally, George Cottrell.<\/p>\n
It is also examining payments from a company controlled by Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice, which received \u00a31m from Fiona Cottrell in June 2024.<\/p>\n
A Verbatim Investigations spokesperson said: “Verbatim will cooperate with the police’s investigation.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the news report, an undercover investigator posing as the son of an American donor is recorded raising…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":765203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-765202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765202","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=765202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/765203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}