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Foreign donation sting
Nigel Farage said he “wasn’t even listening” during a meeting at Reform UK’s annual conference in Birmingham after undercover reporters from Verbatim posed as a potential Reform supporter and his wealthy American father, an impermissible donor, who paid for £30,000 of polling commissioned by Reform.
““I wasn’t even listening” during a meeting at the centre of a controversy”
The Guardian reported Farage was forced to suspend close aide Dan Jukes and Reform’s head of policy, James Orr, on Friday after they were filmed in an undercover investigation appearing to plot to get around electoral laws on foreign donations.
Reuters said the Channel 4 investigation alleged two senior Reform figures arranged for a U.S. company to pay more than £30,000 for three opinion polls commissioned by the party, and that such an arrangement could breach British laws on political funding that ban foreign donations.
In the same Reuters account, Farage told LBC radio, “The party has broken no laws. The party has not taken any dodgy money or anything like that whatsoever.”
Suspensions and denials
Farage told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that he knew donation law “better than anybody” and said he was told the money was being given via a UK family office, while the BBC challenge referenced an undercover reporter saying they “run an American family office”.
When challenged, Farage said, “I frankly wasn’t even listening,” and added, “I was told there was a global family office based in London, so the money could have come from Singapore.”
The London Evening Standard said Farage denied wrongdoing throughout the three-day event and quoted him telling delegates, “There will be times in this journey when there are good days and times when there are difficult days.”
The same Standard report said Labour Party chairwoman Bridget Phillipson accused Farage of “desperate excuses and pathetic deflection tactics to try to distract from his and his party’s shady finances.”
Met police review
The Metropolitan Police said it was aware of a video circulating from the Reform UK conference showing an incident with a protester and asked the woman to come forward after footage showed audience members pulling her hair and grabbing her head as she was carried out of the conference hall.
“The Met police are now assessing evidence after a complaint”
Separately, Reuters said the governing Labour Party wrote to the police asking them to investigate possible criminal offences, including an alleged proposal to channel a larger overseas donation through a UK intermediary, and that the police would assess any information provided to them.
The Guardian said the Met police are now assessing evidence after a complaint that Farage, Orr and Jukes may have broken political funding laws, and that they all deny wrongdoing.
In the Reuters account of the conference’s fallout, Reform announced an internal investigation and said Orr and Dan Jukes had stepped down pending its results, while Farage remained under parliamentary investigation over a £5 million donation from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne in 2024.