Robert Jenrick has said Reform UK believed that \u00a372m in donations it has received from two cryptocurrency billionaires were “entirely in line with the law”.<\/p>\n
The party’s economic spokesman told the BBC that he did not expect that it will have to return any of the money from Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne, who are both British and have spent time living overseas.<\/p>\n
The government is seeking to change the law on donations to UK political parties from British expats, including a \u00a3100,000 cap backdated to 25 March.<\/p>\n
“These two donations are entirely in line with the law as it is and, as far as we know, the law as it’s going to be in the future,” Jenrick said.<\/p>\n
Jenrick also told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “It might be that [Housing Secretary] Angela Rayner or the government keep trying to change the law to make it even harder for people to donate to Reform, nothing would surprise me. <\/p>\n
“But, as it stands, we believe these are entirely in line with the law.”<\/p>\n
BBC News has been told that both Delo and Harborne have returned to the UK. Delo is understood to have been back in the country since last year.<\/p>\n
Jenrick said Delo had returned to the UK “in part so that he can comply with the changes to the law”.<\/p>\n
As well as limiting how much British citizens can donate to political parties from overseas, the government has proposed limiting how much those who move back to the UK can give to \u00a3100,000 in the remainder of the calendar year and the following calendar year after they return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert Jenrick has said Reform UK believed that \u00a372m in donations it has received from two cryptocurrency billionaires…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":769314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-769313","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\/769313","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=769313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/769314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}