By Jad Menebhi
Two British cryptocurrency billionaires, who both currently live abroad, have donated millions to Britain’s far-right political party, Reform UK, during the first half of 2026. Recent figures have shown that Nigel Farage’s party is the best-funded party currently in the United Kingdom.
The donations, totalling £7 million, were donated before the Labour government created a plan to limit the amount that British citizens living abroad could donate to political parties to £100,000 per year. Reform has condemned this policy, calling it an attempt to limit party funds for the next general election.
A British cryptocurrency investor living in Thailand, Christopher Harborne, donated £3 million to Reform UK in January. Ben Delo, the British co-founder of cryptocurrency trading site BitMEX, who is living in Hong Kong, donated a total of £4 million over the course of two separate payments in January and March.
The two men have accounted for 75% of the total private donations to Reform UK from January through March, £7 million out of £9.3 million. During this period all parties declared a combined total of £20.7 million, the Labour Party and the Conservatives both declaring close to £4 million. As well as the £7 million from Harborne and Delo, Reform UK also declared that biotech entrepreneur David Grainger donated a further £1.1 million to the party.
Harborne holds the record for the largest donation to a British political party in history, standing at £9 million in August of 2025. Across 2025, Harborne donated a total of £12 million to Reform UK.
As for the Labour Party, their biggest individual donations were from Lord David Sainsbury and Gary Lubner, the former chief executive of Autoglass. They both each gave £550,000. The Liberal Democrats declared a total of £2.2 million in private donations, and the Green party, who declared £209,000 in private donations.
Party leader Nigel Farage is also under investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner about whether he was required to declare a £5 million donation from Harborne just before the 2024 general election, Reform UK’s first general election. Farage argues that the donation was a gift to himself from Harborne and it was private and unrelated to his politics.
The Labour government’s policy to limit the amount of overseas donations from March 25th forces parties who have received overseas donations above £100,000 per year after March 25th to return the funds to the donor. Harborne and Delo have both condemned the policy. Harborne claimed that he was the reason for the Labour government’s implementation of the overseas donation limit. Delo said that he plans to move back to the UK in an effort to circumvent the policy and continue to donate to Reform UK.
