As he struggles with questions about the millions he has received from the billionaire Christopher Harborne, Nigel Farage has made no secret of his enthusiastic support for the industry that made part of his benefactor’s fortune – cryptocurrency. The Reform UK leader even urged the governor of the Bank of England to drop a crypto policy that may be costly for Harborne.
But another element of Harborne’s business interests could prove still more consequential if it shapes Farage’s positions. There appears to be no precedent for a major UK donor who is so entwined with the military.
The Guardian’s ongoing investigation into the origins of Harborne’s riches and whether his donations inform Farage’s agenda has established the Thailand-based tycoon’s global web of commercial interests in the arms industry and military contracts. Among Harborne’s business collaborators are a striking number of former army officers, air force pilots, military officials and even, it seems, spies.
Described by his lawyers as an “intensely private” man, Harborne’s military interests reveal another side to the proprietor of a wellness sanctuary on a paradise island off Thailand.
A businessman who works with Harborne’s jet fuel venture describes it as a top supplier to US military operations worldwide, “strengthened by former US Department of Defense specialists and retired US military pilots, bringing decades of operational and strategic expertise to every mission”.
And Harborne is the biggest shareholder in what was once the research arm of the UK military, now a private company developing autonomous weapons.
At a moment when one of the biggest questions political leaders face is how much of the state’s resources to divert to military spending, Farage’s reliance on Harborne’s money presents a potential conflict of interest. Harborne has given Reform two-thirds of its funding, plus a £5m undeclared gift to Farage that the MPs’ watchdog is investigating.
Sam Power, a political funding expert at the University of Bristol, said: “It doesn’t necessarily follow that Reform will have policies that will benefit Harborne’s interests in the military-industrial complex. But it warrants a spotlight. It will be interesting if Reform’s policies start aligning with Christopher Harborne in this area as they have in cryptocurrency.”
Harborne’s lawyers at the London firm Schillings said: “The policies or positions Mr Farage may choose to adopt are a matter for Mr Farage and the Reform party. Our client’s commercial interests are unconnected in any way whatsoever with his political affiliations.”
Harborne’s military beginnings
After private school, Cambridge and stints at the McKinsey management consultancy and PepsiCo, Harborne moved to Thailand in the 1990s, made money in the markets, and set up on his own.
In 2006, he loaned £1.6m to a company called Subsea Resources, whose deep-sea operations were designed to salvage metal and artefacts from sunken shipwrecks and retrieve lost aircraft for governments. His loans “were made on an informal basis without legal documentation”, the company’s filing says, and he then exchanged them for shares, becoming a director in December 2006.
Subsea Resources only had five directors. Another, who joined on the same day as Harborne, was David Charters. His official filing said he was a Foreign Office veteran. That styling is frequently used for those who were, in fact, officers of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. A description of Charters at a security conference years later called him “a former MI6 intelligence officer”.
That was not Subsea Resources’ only apparent connection to the UK’s security apparatus. When Harborne gave up his board seat months later, his replacement was Tim McClement, a recently retired Royal Navy vice-admiral whose exploits included sinking the Belgrano while a submariner in the Falklands war.
Harborne was at the time setting up a venture of his own, AML Global, which has become a major military contractor. At the outset, there were connections to the armed forces, Thai corporate documents indicate. A fellow British director of a company that would go on to be part of AML Global, Arthur Napolitano, had proceeded from officer training at Sandhurst to the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. He later served in the Sultan of Oman’s land forces, a corporate biography says.
The new venture was close to Harborne’s heart. “Many of his business activities and investments flow from his passion for aviation,” say lawyers for Harborne, a licensed pilot who once crashed a light aircraft in residential Hampshire. AML Global is one of them. It brokers jet fuel, arranging for supplies to reach clients on whatever far-flung tarmac they wish to fill up their private jets.
AML sourced fuel in North America, Europe, Asia and Russia, according to a 2006 article in the industry press. It has, Harborne’s lawyers say, “grown into a worldwide leader in its industry with a comprehensive fuel supply network that maintains over 1,200 locations worldwide”. They add that AML Global no longer arranges the supply of jet fuel produced in Russia.
At first, the clients were civilians. In time, AML Global started to supply the organisation that consumes more fossil fuels than any other: the American military.
AML Global Pentagon contracts
The LinkedIn profile for Scott Elder, AML Global’s vice-president, records that he was a colonel in the US air force. Another entry on an earlier profile said he worked at the US embassy in Bangkok from 1996 (the year Harborne arrived) to 2011 (the year Harborne took Thai citizenship), and was a “host nation liaison” for the Pentagon.
Shortly after his time with the US government appears to have ended, Elder joined AML Global, and by the following year, 2013, AML Global was receiving Pentagon contracts for jet fuel. They started with $4,000 for a shipment to the Philippines and stayed small for years.
In 2017, Elder told his school alumni newsletter he had “decided to quit his day job and dedicate his life to the study of the Champa Kingdom (Vietnam)”. But instead he stuck with Harborne, and AML Global’s military income boomed.
Late in Donald Trump’s first term, AML Global’s US military contracts started to surge, reaching tens of millions annually. They total more than $140m in the years since, according to published US government data.
While AML Global issues few statements, publicity material by its Northern Irish partner, Jet Assist, says no other company supplies the US military with jet fuel in more places beyond its borders – 62 by the end of 2025. The material trumpeted AML Global’s recruitment of US military personnel and envisaged its role in “future US, UK and allied military deployments into Europe”.
AML Global’s $140m from the Pentagon may not be a big share of the billions it spends each year on fuel but Harborne is trusted to supply the American armed forces in strategic locations, from Europe’s frontier with Russia, to the Middle East, a South Pacific outpost and Asian allies threatened by China.
“The government vets these companies,” says Jerry McGinn, a military procurement expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies thinktank in Washington. “They take this very seriously.”
According to documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, bankers filed an alert with US authorities in 2014 saying they had been “unable to identify the economic, business or lawful purpose” for large payments Harborne made related to crypto dealings under his Thai name, Chakrit Sakunkrit. But such suspicious activity reports are evidence of concern, not wrongdoing. Harborne denies any, and the Pentagon evidently sees him as a trusted supplier.
A growing stake in Britain’s defence industry
In the UK’s military-industrial base, Harborne occupies an even more sensitive position – one he has expanded dramatically since becoming an influential donor.
In 2022, while he was solidifying his position as one of the most influential political financiers by following his payments to Farage’s party with others to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, he started building a stake in QinetiQ.
QinetiQ used to be the Ministry of Defence’s research arm. It was privatised under Tony Blair and, under MoD contracts, remains integral to the UK’s war-fighting capabilities. It runs Hebridean missile-launch sites, develops stealth capabilities for nuclear submarines, maintains the Royal Air Force’s Typhoon fighter jets, and is building the drones and robots that are redefining warfare.
Harborne, whose ancestor RC Sherriff feted the invention of the bouncing bomb in his wartime drama The Dam Busters, is now QinetiQ’s biggest shareholder, with a 15% stake worth about £400m. And his military tech investments have been proliferating.
In March, he bought a stake in a company set up by a former Royal Marines reservist to develop “Iron Man” suits for combatants. That came after he acquired shares in a rival to Starlink, the satellite service that has given Elon Musk the power to influence the course of conflicts such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And Harborne’s military connections are not confined to the west. They appear to extend to Thailand, which granted him citizenship in 2011 and whose armed forces loom over civilian life.
Paul Chambers, a leading expert on the Thai military who left the country last year under pressure from the army, says Harborne maintains a business relationship with the armed forces there through AML Global and Sherriff Global Group, which appears to run Harborne’s fleet of private jets.
“The Royal Thai Air Force interacts with these firms for global logistical support, international flight operations, and overall air transport administration,” says Chambers, now a lecturer at the University of Oklahoma. Neither Harborne’s lawyers nor the Thai air force answered questions about this.
Donations and Reform’s defence policy
Harborne has lately begun to intervene personally in the big military questions of the day.
Last year, the Guardian revealed that he accompanied Johnson on a September 2023 visit to Ukraine after giving the former Tory prime minister £1m. Jamie Shawyer, a Gulfstream pilot who has worked on Harborne’s aviation ventures for 20 years, appears to have flown the pair to Poland, from where they proceeded overland to Kyiv.
Harborne later said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that Johnson arranged for him to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy and that he told Ukraine’s president: “I’m absolutely passionate that Europe has to defend itself.”
By June 2024, when Reform launched its general election manifesto, Harborne had switched his largesse back to Farage, handing him a £5m gift. Both insist it was “unconditional”, and Farage decided he did not need to declare it after he won a seat.
The manifesto committed Reform to increasing defence spending and to introducing “incentives and tax breaks to boost the UK defence industry”. It said it would “improve equipment self-sufficiency and manufacture world-class products for export”, and set up a “Joint Acquisition Corp” that would “ensure world-class procurement”.
These policies seem likely to benefit QinetiQ and perhaps other Harborne military interests.
Farage says Harborne asks for nothing in exchange for his donations. Yet just as Farage has championed Tether, the crypto firm Harborne part-owns, he has saluted his benefactor’s military interests.
“Christopher Harborne is an immensely successful man,” Farage told the Triggernometry podcast in July. “They all say crypto, but actually that is but a part of what this guy does. I think there are some things that are known in public, such as his big stake that he holds in QinetiQ, the defence technology company. I think he probably owns the biggest jet refuelling operation in the world, plus his crypto investments.”
And Farage has struck militaristic positions.
When Trump bombed Iran, he urged Keir Starmer to have British forces join the campaign.
After Trump expressed disquiet with British plans to give Mauritius control of the Chagos Islands, home to a US-UK military base, Farage boarded one of Harborne’s private jets and flew to the region in protest. Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, has said his party would rip up the deal if it takes power.
A Reform spokesperson said Harborne had not discussed defence spending, defence policy or foreign policy with Farage or party officials and denied that its megadonor’s military business interests gave Reform a conflict of interest on defence spending policy.
Harborne’s lawyers added that he “has not sought to influence any politician to support any of his commercial business interests”.
