As Nigel Farage toasted the inauguration of Donald Trump in Washington earlier this year at a glitzy party hosted by Republican pollsters, there was an unfamiliar bearded figure by his side.
Reform’s new mega-donor Christopher Harborne is based in Thailand and is rarely seen with Farage in the UK.
But he was at a party sponsored by Reform supporter Arron Banks and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s anti-China campaign in January, having bankrolled Farage’s three-day trip to celebrate Trump’s return to the White House at a cost of £27,000.
Harborne has given generously to Farage before, donating £10m to the Brexit party at the 2019 election – when Farage stood down many of his candidates against Tories and Boris Johnson won by a landslide.
He switched his allegiance in 2022, giving £1.5m to the Conservatives and later £1m to Johnson’s office after he stood down as prime minister.
At this point, it was not clear whether Farage would again enjoy the businessman’s largesse, so the £9m for Reform is a huge coup for the party.
Harborne has described himself as “an intensely private person” – although in footage produced by his Thai wellness retreat he talks about pet interests such as longevity and how to live well in old age.
In a 2024 defamation claim over a Wall Street Journal story about his involvement with a cryptocurrency called Tether, Harborne’s legal documents said: “He does not proselytise his views, he does not give speeches or media interviews, and he does not maintain active social media accounts.”
Some of his charitable donations have been made in private, such as “purchasing schoolbooks for remote tribes in Thailand”, where he has lived for more than 20 years, taken citizenship and adopted a Thai name, Chakrit Sakunkrit.
But the scale of his donations in the UK has allowed him to shape the course of British politics, leading to questions about where his wealth comes from.
Harborne gives some details in his defamation claim. After studying at Cambridge and a leading French business school, he joined the McKinsey management consultancy. When he started setting up his own businesses in 2000, many of them flowed from a “passion for aviation”. A keen pilot, Harborne once crashed a plane into a Hampshire couple’s home.
His interests extend from steel to the defence sector. It is, though, his cryptocurrency ventures – digital money not backed by a state – that appear to be the most lucrative.
Harborne was an early investor in bitcoin and Ethereum, the two biggest cryptocurrencies. The latter “now accounts for a major portion of his net worth”, documents say.
And he is one of the handful of major shareholders in Tether, a newer type of crypto that is pegged to the dollar, making it less volatile and easier to exchange for real currencies.
Developed by a band including a former child movie star and an Italian former plastic surgeon, Tether is based in El Salvador. To maintain the peg, it holds dollars and other assets, making money off the interest and investment returns. As the popularity of Tether tokens has ballooned – there are 185bn in issue – so have those profitable reserves.
Tether says it made profits of $13bn (£10.2bn) last year, one-and-a-half times those of McDonald’s. With only 150 staff, it has been called the most profitable company per employee ever. Harborne holds about 12% of Tether’s shares.
He is not an executive and it is not clear how the company’s profits are distributed, but if he is entitled to a payout equivalent to his stake, that could amount to $1bn a year.
Law enforcement agencies have grown concerned about criminals using Tether tokens, which like all crypto are designed to conceal user identities. In November, the Guardian reported that the UK’s National Crime Agency had found that money-laundering schemes helping the Russian war effort in Ukraine relied on Tether tokens.
Tether says it “unequivocally condemns the illegal use of stablecoins and is fully committed to combating illicit activity”.
Harborne’s lawyers said that accusing an investor in Tether of complicity in crimes perpetrated by users of its tokens would be “akin to claiming the US Treasury is an accomplice in money laundering because it prints the US dollar”.
Despite the concerns, Tether’s influence is spreading fast. Donald Trump, whose family is making millions from crypto, chose Tether’s banker, Howard Lutnick, as his commerce secretary. And in the UK, Tether has a champion in Harborne’s main political beneficiary – Farage.
In a September appearance on LBC, when he said he was going to the Bank of England to argue against curbs on crypto, Farage said: “Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company. You know, stable coins, crypto, this world is enormous, and I’ve been urging for years that London should embrace it.”
Speaking on Thursday about Harborne’s ambitions as a donor, Farage said the investor wanted “absolutely nothing in return at all” for his £9m.
But the Reform leader also brought up Harborne’s interests in crypto, which appear aligned with the party’s own aims, saying: “He just happens to think we have not made the most of Brexit, that we are not getting into the 21st-century technologies, and for all the talk about datacentres, about AI and, from us at least, about crypto, we cannot do this without the most massive re-evaluation of what is currently a catastrophic energy policy. Have I promised him anything? Hand on heart, I have not promised him a single thing in return for his wealth.”
