Two crypto billionaires gave Reform UK £72 million in two days. One pleaded guilty in New York. The other gave Farage £5 million that nobody declared.

On Friday Ben Delo gave Reform UK £36 million, the largest donation any British party has ever received. On Saturday Christopher Harborne matched it. Reform says the money only levels the playing field with Labour and the Conservatives. We took that claim to the Electoral Commission’s register. It does not survive.

Two days, £72 million

Delo announced his gift on 11 September. He said it was “the duty of people with broad shoulders and deep pockets to step up and help Reform to win and govern”. Nigel Farage said he was “honoured and humbled”.

Harborne’s statement came the next afternoon. Reform said the money had already arrived.

“Whilst I have been making donations to Reform of around £1 million a month, Ben Delo told me he was going to make a record donation of £36 million. My competitive spirit inspired me to match it, so that is what I’ve done. And I hope others may join us.”

Christopher Harborne, 12 September 2026, as published by LBC

He went on: “So what do I expect in return for my donations? Nothing. No peerage, no policy change, just a party that is ready for government.”

Neither gift is on the register yet. Both fall in the third quarter of 2026, which the Commission publishes in early December. Until then the only record is what the party and the donors have said. Everything else in this piece is on the register, and we say which is which.

The man who pleaded guilty

Delo co-founded the crypto exchange BitMEX in 2014. In February 2022 he pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, for wilfully failing to run an anti-money laundering programme. Prosecutors said BitMEX was “in effect a money laundering platform”: Delo had told regulators Americans were barred from it while thousands were trading on it, and, according to the court documents, the company altered American users’ addresses so they appeared to be abroad. He was sentenced to thirty months of probation and paid a $10 million fine.

In March 2025 Donald Trump pardoned him. Delo calls the conviction a “non-crime” and, in the Telegraph, “a regulatory failing that isn’t even a crime in the UK”. His lawyers say the prosecutor’s remarks were “deliberately partisan” and formed no part of the court’s findings. A framed copy of the pardon hangs in the hallway of the building he funds in Westminster.

He had been living in Hong Kong. Labour capped donations from British citizens abroad at £100,000, so he moved back. “I will move back to Britain early so I can contribute more to Reform’s budget,” he wrote in April. The register shows what followed: £2 million in January, £2 million in March, £1 million in April, £3 million in May. Then the £36 million. That is £44 million in a year.

The man who gave Farage £5 million

Harborne is 63, Westminster School and Cambridge, and has lived in Thailand for more than twenty years. He holds Thai citizenship under the name Chakrit Sakunkrit. He owns around 12 per cent of Tether, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin. The Sunday Times Rich List put him sixth among people with a claim to British residence this year, at £18.2 billion.

He has been paying for Nigel Farage’s parties for seven years. The register shows just over £10 million to the Brexit Party in 2019 and early 2020, then £1.5 million to the Conservatives in 2022 and £1 million to Boris Johnson’s private company that November. In August 2025 he gave Reform £9 million, at the time the largest gift by a living person to a British party. He gave £3 million in November and £3 million in January. Now £36 million.

The line that matters is the fourth one. In 2024 Harborne gave Farage £5 million personally. Farage had said he would not stand at the general election. He reversed that in June and won Clacton. The gift appeared on no register. It came out on 29 April 2026, in the Guardian, almost two years later.

Farage first said it was for personal security. Then he told the Sun it was “unconditional”, a reward for “campaigning for Brexit for 27 years”. Harborne told the Telegraph: “I gave him the money because of my great admiration for the decades of work he had done to achieve Brexit.” Sky News then reported that Farage had bought a £1.4 million house in Surrey for cash, with no mortgage, on 10 May 2024, after the gift.

Farage says he was under “no obligation” to declare it because he was not yet an MP. The rules say a new MP registers financial interests within a month of election, and a gift over £500 must come from a permissible source. On 13 May 2026 the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened an inquiry under the failure-to-register rule. The Conservatives referred the gift to the Electoral Commission, which said it was considering it. It has also been reported that a bank filed a suspicious activity report over the payment and that it was referred to the National Crime Agency. None of these bodies has reported. Nothing has been found against Farage or Harborne, and this piece does not say otherwise.

“No policy change”

Harborne says he wants nothing in return. Here is what the party did while he was its largest donor.

On 29 May 2025, at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, Farage launched a Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill, the only draft bill Reform has ever published. It would cut capital gains tax on crypto from 18 to 24 per cent to a flat 10 per cent, require the Bank of England to hold bitcoin in its reserves, let people pay HMRC in crypto, and make it illegal for a bank to refuse a customer for lawful crypto dealing. Crypto did not appear in Reform’s 2024 manifesto.

On 25 September 2025 Farage met the Governor of the Bank of England privately, to argue against a state digital pound and for a “crypto strategic reserve”. In March 2026 he put £275,650 of his own money into Stack BTC, a bitcoin venture chaired by Kwasi Kwarteng. On 30 May 2026, a year to the day after its launch and seventeen days after the standards inquiry into the Harborne gift opened, the crypto bill disappeared from Reform’s website.

Tether is the largest issuer of dollar stablecoins and holds most of its reserves in US government debt. A British government that put bitcoin on the central bank’s balance sheet and cut tax on crypto gains would be good for the whole sector Harborne owns a slice of. Harborne has denied influencing, or trying to influence, any politician on crypto. The register does not show motive, and neither do we. It shows the money and the dates.

Delo’s interest is plainer. The only crime he has been convicted of is a US anti-money laundering offence, which he calls a regulatory failing that is not a crime here. Reform’s bill would have made it illegal for a British bank to close a crypto trader’s account.

The building where Rupert Lowe drafts deportation

Delo’s money does not stop at the party. A HOPE not hate and Guardian investigation in March found he funds The Sanctuary, a second-floor base overlooking Westminster Abbey, furnished like a Pall Mall club, used free of charge by around fifty projects that are told not to mention it online.

Rupert Lowe launched Restore Britain there. In November 2025 he used its rooms to promote a mass-deportation paper, modelled on America’s “Operation Wetback” of the 1950s, calling for “forced removals and subtler tactics for making residence in Britain unliveable for those with no right to be here”. Aporia, a race science magazine that has interviewed the white nationalist Jared Taylor, held a debate there in July 2024 and has access to the booking system.

Delo wrote in the Telegraph in April that Lowe is “a breath of fresh air” who “shifts the Overton window a little further every day”. His one recorded speech, the 2024 Battle of Ideas welcome address, called political correctness “an existential threat to western civilisation”.

Harborne’s connection to Lowe is older and thinner. Lowe was a Brexit Party MEP in 2019 while Harborne was paying for the party. Lowe has said Harborne was in the room at a “secret meeting” in a Blackfriars townhouse where Brexit Party figures met Conservative fixers before Farage stood down 317 candidates; he describes Harborne as “bullish”, offering to fund even more candidates. That is Lowe’s account. The register shows no gift from Harborne to Restore Britain or to Lowe. Restore Britain’s only registered donation is £250,000 from Cade Hill Investments on 1 May 2026, and the Guardian has reported £500,000 in all from the entrepreneur Simon Galbraith.

One more name ties the two stories together. Delo funds James Orr, the Cambridge academic who was Reform’s head of policy. On 3 September Channel 4 broadcast undercover footage of Orr and Farage’s aide Dan Jukes discussing how to take American money for polling through a British intermediary; Orr said the party “could easily get away with it”. Orr resigned on 4 September. The Metropolitan Police opened a criminal investigation on 9 September. Delo’s £36 million arrived on the 11th.

“A level playing field”

Reform’s line is that even this only catches it up. Richard Tice told LBC the £36 million put the party “on a level playing field”. Delo wrote that he gave it to “level the playing field” against a Labour Party “sitting on its cushion of trade union funding”. Farage said last year that Labour and the Conservatives had “relied on their ability to hand out peerages to bankroll their parties for decades”.

We pulled every registered donation to every party from 2017 to June 2026 from the Electoral Commission, excluded public money, and counted. Here is what the register says.

Reform was already out-raising both parties before the two gifts. Since the general election it had registered £33.7m against the Conservatives’ £24.1m and Labour’s £19.6m. In the first half of 2026 it raised roughly twice what either of them did, and it has led the register in each of the last four quarters.

With the two gifts, 2026 is the biggest fundraising year any British party has recorded. Reform’s registered £14.7m to June plus the announced £72m is £86.7m. The Conservatives’ best year on the register is 2019, a general election year, at £52.3m. Labour’s is 2024, another election year, at £37.5m. Reform has beaten both with a quarter of the year left, and no election.

Two days beat any campaign. In the six weeks before the 2019 election the Conservatives raised £25.7m, the most any party has taken in a campaign window on this register. Labour’s 2024 campaign raised £11.9m. Reform took £72m between a Friday and a Saturday in September with no election called.

Nobody has ever given this much at once. The largest single donation on the register before this week was Lord Sainsbury’s £10 million to the Conservatives in 2023. Harborne’s £9 million last August was second. Each of this week’s gifts is three and a half times the old record.

The trade union comparison runs the other way. Delo’s “cushion” is on the register too. Every trade union gift to Labour from 2021 to 2025 adds up to £32.6m. Two men gave Reform £72m in two days, more than double what every union gave Labour in five years. Labour’s three largest donors since the election are Unite, the GMB and Usdaw, and together they are 32 per cent of its money. Reform’s two largest donors were 68 per cent of its money before this week and are about 90 per cent after it.

Where the claim has something to it. Add up everything since 2019 and the Conservatives are still ahead: £201.5m against Reform’s £122.6m including this week, with Labour on £121.8m. That is eight years of a governing party against a party that barely existed for four of them. Over the period Reform has actually been competing, since July 2024, it has taken £105.7m to the Conservatives’ £24.1m, four times as much.

So the playing field was level before Friday, on the register’s own numbers, and it is now tilted further towards Reform than it has been towards any party in the Commission’s records. The difference is not the amount. It is that 90 per cent of it came from two men, one of whom pleaded guilty in New York and one of whom gave the leader £5 million that nobody declared.

How we counted

The figures come from the Electoral Commission’s donations register, exported as CSV on 12 September 2026, for every party on every register from 2017 to 2026 on an accepted-date basis. We excluded public funds (Short money, Cranborne money and policy development grants), which are not donations, and kept cash, non-cash and visit entries from every accounting unit as well as the central parties. “Reform” includes the Brexit Party, which is the same registration. Loans are a separate register and are not counted. Quarterly figures for 2026 cover January to June only; the Commission publishes July to September in December. The two £36 million gifts are marked as announced wherever they appear, and nothing else given since June is included, so the register side of every 2026 comparison is an undercount.