Ben Delo gave Reform UK £44 million. He also funds the Westminster hub where mass deportation gets drafted.

Ben Delo is the biggest political donor in British history. Most people have never heard of him. This is who he is, what his money buys, and what he pleaded guilty to.

The money

Delo gave Reform UK £4 million in early 2026. He gave another £4 million in September. Then he gave £36 million in a single transfer, the largest gift any British party has ever received.

He had been living in Hong Kong. Labour capped donations from British citizens abroad at £100,000. So he moved back. He said so in the Telegraph in April: “I will move back to Britain early so I can contribute more to Reform’s budget.”

His original plan was £1 million a month until the election. He sent the whole sum at once because he thought the government might cap large donations before he finished.

He put his reasons in his own words:

“The biggest obstacle to national recovery is the entrenched self-deception of our elites. Their regime of nonsense now poses such a grave threat to the UK that, for the first time in my life, I’ve become politically active.”

Ben Delo, the Telegraph, April 2026, as quoted by the Guardian

And on the £36 million: “Unlike the people who express mock concern for the health of ‘our democracy’ while doing everything they can to keep it as a cartel, I want a fair fight and a level playing field.”

The building

The Reform cheques are the public part. The other part sits five minutes from Parliament, on the second floor of a neo-Gothic building overlooking Westminster Abbey. It is called The Sanctuary.

HOPE not hate and the Guardian found it in March. Delo pays for it. It is furnished like a Pall Mall club: Chesterfield sofas, a stuffed penguin, a sketch of Cecil Rhodes. Around fifty projects use it free of charge. They get meeting rooms, podcast studios and catered events. They are told not to mention the place online. Delo’s name is not on the door.

Rupert Lowe launched Restore Britain there. In November 2025 he used its rooms to promote a paper on mass deportation. The paper took its inspiration from America’s “Operation Wetback” of the 1950s. It called for:

“forced removals and subtler tactics for making residence in Britain unliveable for those with no right to be here”

Restore Britain deportation paper, promoted at The Sanctuary, November 2025, as quoted by HOPE not hate

Lowe holds his “rape gang inquiry” in the same building. Restore Britain’s website asks for migrants to be held in “deliberately austere” camps.

Aporia uses it too. Aporia is a race science magazine. It has interviewed the white nationalist Jared Taylor, who told its show that “there is no possibility of blacks and whites living peacefully together”. In July 2024 Aporia held a debate at The Sanctuary. The venue was given to ticket holders on the morning of the event. Byline Times reports that Aporia has access to the building’s internal booking system.

Delo funds James Orr directly. Orr is the Cambridge academic who is now Reform UK’s head of policy. Delo pays £100,000 a year to Claire Fox’s Battle of Ideas, which has its own room in the building. He has funded Toby Young’s Free Speech Union. Civic Future, a talent scheme for future MPs and advisers that has been informally advised by the race science advocate Andrew Sabisky, runs its classes there.

When HOPE not hate asked him about all this, his lawyers said he supports “actors of a range of views, including those from the left”, and that this does not mean he endorses each of them. That is the whole of his answer.

What he says about Rupert Lowe

Delo does not hide his view of Lowe. He wrote it in the Telegraph in April 2026:

Rupert Lowe is “a breath of fresh air” who “shifts the Overton window a little further every day”.

Ben Delo, the Telegraph, April 2026, as quoted by Sam Bright

Read that against the paper Lowe launched in Delo’s building. The window Lowe is shifting is the one that decides whether forced removals are a policy a British party can put its name to.

The rest of Delo’s stated politics is narrower than his funding. His one recorded speech is the welcome address at the Battle of Ideas in October 2024. There he called political correctness “an existential threat to western civilisation” and “a totalising ideology that’s actually strangling our societies”. He added: “And quite frankly, I’ve had enough of it.”

What he pleaded guilty to

Delo co-founded BitMEX in 2014. It became one of the largest crypto derivatives exchanges in the world. He invented its signature product, the perpetual swap.

In February 2022 he pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to violating the Bank Secrecy Act. The charge was that BitMEX had wilfully failed to run an anti-money laundering programme.

The prosecutors’ account was not gentle. They said BitMEX was “in effect a money laundering platform”. Delo had told regulators that Americans were barred from the exchange. Thousands of Americans were trading on it, and the company had hired American influencers to bring them in. According to the court documents, Delo admitted the company altered the addresses on American users’ records so they appeared to be abroad.

He was sentenced to thirty months of probation and paid a $10 million fine.

The prosecutor also had something to say about his charity work. The money he gave away, the prosecutor said, “no doubt resulted in large part from the fact that he personally received… dividends from BitMEX while the company systematically flouted” American banking law “for a period of five years”.

Delo rejects all of this. He says he ran the business “very straight”. He calls the conviction a “non-crime” and a “spurious blip”. In the Telegraph he called it “a regulatory failing that isn’t even a crime in the UK”. His lawyers told HOPE not hate the prosecutor’s statements were “deliberately partisan” and formed no part of the court’s findings.

The pardon

In March 2025 Donald Trump pardoned Delo and his two BitMEX co-founders. Nobody has explained how that came about. Delo has said only that he is “very grateful” to the president.

A framed copy of the pardon hangs in the hallway of The Sanctuary.

That is the sequence. A guilty plea in a US court. A pardon from Trump. A move back to Britain to get around a donations cap. Then £44 million to Nigel Farage’s party, and a private building where the people writing Britain’s deportation policy meet for free.