Reform UK has been given a record \u00a336m donation by Ben Delo, a British cryptocurrency billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls.<\/p>\n
The businessman, who has moved back to the UK from Hong Kong, is now the biggest UK political donor by far, dwarfing the \u00a315m contribution to Reform UK from Thailand-based Christopher Harborne.<\/p>\n
The huge donation will be a boost for party leader Nigel Farage at a time when he is facing a police investigation into overseas funding for Reform, plus a standards inquiry into a \u00a35m undeclared personal gift from Harborne.<\/p>\n
It had been thought Delo could be caught by the overseas cap requiring donors to have been resident in the UK for 12 months before giving more than \u00a3100,000 but Reform insisted earlier this month that they were confident Delo would not have to take back any cash<\/a>.<\/p>\n Delo was convicted in the US in 2022 for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls in his trillion-dollar cryptocurrency business BitMEX, before being pardoned by Donald Trump<\/a>. He has previously given Reform \u00a38m since the start of the year.<\/p>\n His gifts show the rise of Reform\u2019s mega-donors, which Labour has been considering clamping down on.<\/p>\n Keir Starmer shied away from the idea of a cap on all donations and Andy Burnham also recently backed away from supporting a cap. However, more recently the government said it was looking at ways of dealing with mega-donations to make sure a few figures are not having an excessive influence in politics.<\/p>\n On Friday night, Stella Creasy, the Labour MP pushing for a cap, said: \u201cThe government has admitted UK mega-donors are a problem \u2013 donations like this show why we must act and the good news is it\u2019s not too late to do something about them.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can still stop these people from distorting the next election by confirming what the cap should be on UK donations in the representation of the people bill in the Lords.<\/p>\n \u201cThis donation tonight \u2013 more for Reform on one day than the entire amount spent by Labour in the general election \u2013 shows that cannot come too soon to protect British democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n Many more Labour MPs were also horrified by the prospect of such a huge cash injection for Reform ahead of the next election.<\/p>\n Delo\u2019s donation was revealed in the Telegraph, which was given the information by Reform after the party was approached by the Sunday Times earlier on Friday.<\/p>\n Farage said: \u201cI am honoured and humbled that Ben Delo has shown such confidence in Reform. Ben knows that we are the only party that can turn the country around and reverse Britain\u2019s decline.\u201d<\/p>\n In a Telegraph article in April, Delo explained his motivation for turning to Reform, saying England was his home and that \u201cthe biggest obstacle to national recovery is the entrenched self-deception of our elites\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cTheir regime of nonsense now poses such a grave threat to the UK that, for the first time in my life, I\u2019ve become politically active,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n He said that as a person on the autism spectrum, he did not like it that \u201cthe official culture of government now forces everyone to be chronically dishonest\u201d, citing expression of views on transgender people.<\/p>\n In his Telegraph article, he wrote: \u201cI helped build one of the world\u2019s first major crypto trading platforms, fell foul of US regulators, accepted a plea bargain and a civil fine for a regulatory failing that isn\u2019t even a crime in the UK, but then ended up being pardoned by Donald Trump, the US president, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n Delo, an Oxford graduate who describes himself as a champion of free speech, supports more than 50 organisations across the political spectrum and public life, as well as non-affiliated groups and individuals, from a political base near Westminster Abbey.<\/p>\n A Guardian investigation<\/a> into Delo\u2019s political base found he had given support in kind to Rupert Lowe, the anti-migration MP challenging Farage from the right<\/a>, while also connecting with more mainstream figures including the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, and the former Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove.<\/p>\n Delo\u2019s lawyers previously told the Guardian that he provided space for those with diverse views to express them, and financial support to a broad range of organisations, many of which had conflicting views. This did not mean he endorsed the opinions of each, they said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reform UK has been given a record \u00a336m donation by Ben Delo, a British cryptocurrency billionaire convicted in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":767719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-767718","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\/767718","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=767718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/767719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}