Reform UK receives additional £4m from pardoned crypto billionaire Ben Delo amid overseas donor cap scrutiny

Reform UK has been given a further £4m from the British crypto billionaire Ben Delo, with the party saying it is confident the businessman – who was formerly based in Hong Kong – will not be caught by the new overseas donor cap.

Delo, who was convicted in the US in 2022 for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls in his cryptocurrency business, before being pardoned by Donald Trump, has previously given Reform £4m.

His £8m in gifts shows the rise of Reform’s mega-donors and makes him the party’s second biggest contributor after the Thailand based crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who has given £15m to the party since the last election, as well as £5m to Farage personally before May 2024.

According to new donation figures from the Electoral Commission, Harborne did not give any money in the second quarter of the year and neither did the billionaire Sasan Ghandehari, who recently pledged to give millions.

Harborne and Ghandehari could potentially be caught by the donor cap applied since March this year, which states donors must be on the UK domestic electoral register for at least 12 months to avoid being subject to a £100,000-a-year annual cap.

Delo had been expected to come under the cap after writing in the Telegraph that he had made his first donation since the start of the year, before the government’s cap on donations to political parties by British citizens living abroad.

However, a Reform source said the party was confident it would not have to return any of Delo’s latest £4m, raising the prospect that he may have been on the UK domestic electoral register for longer than previously thought.

Andy Burnham’s government is considering whether to bring an annual cap on donations from UK donors as well as overseas ones, after launching a new taskforce and promising to “tackle the issue of UK based mega-donors”. However, it stopped short of bringing in a cap in the new elections bill this week amid worries among trade unions about their ability to donate.

The latest donor figures show £17m being given to the parties in the second quarter of the year, compared with £11m the previous year, as the parties start preparing for the possibility of an earlier election under Burnham.

Labour received £650,000 from the Autoglass founder, Gary Lubner, and the supermarket tycoon Lord Sainsbury, while the entrepreneur Ali Mosawi donated £550,000.

The Conservative party lagged behind Reform and Labour, getting £265,000 from Flowidea, a firm owned by the banker Henry Angest.

Restore Britain received its largest ever donation: £250,000 from Cade Hill Investments, owned by the tech entrepreneur Simon Galbraith.

Delo, who was pardoned by Trump last year, is said to be in the process of moving back to the UK.

In his Telegraph article in April, he explained his motivation for turning to Reform, saying England was his home and that “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,” he wrote. “Since the start of this year, I have donated £4m to help Nigel Farage to build Reform UK into a genuine alternative party of government. It is already leading in the polls by virtue of recognising and articulating the full scale of the problems our country faces. For the first time, I feel that serious people are looking honestly at what it might take to fix Britain.”

He said that as a person on the autism spectrum, he did not like it that “the official culture of government now forces everyone to be chronically dishonest”, citing expression of views on transgender people.

Delo was convicted in the US in 2022 after pleading guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls at BitMEX, the trillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange he co-founded.

In his Telegraph article, he wrote: “I helped build one of the world’s first major crypto trading platforms, fell foul of US regulators, accepted a plea bargain and a civil fine for a regulatory failing that isn’t even a crime in the UK, but then ended up being pardoned by Donald Trump, the US president, anyway.”

Delo, an Oxford graduate who describes himself as a champion of free speech, supports more than 50 organisations across the political spectrum and public life, as well as non-affiliated groups and individuals.

A Guardian investigation into Delo’s political base in Westminster found he had given support in kind to Rupert Lowe, an anti-migration MP challenging Nigel Farage from the right, while also connecting with more mainstream figures including the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, and the former cabinet minister Michael Gove.

Delo’s lawyers previously told the Guardian that he provided space for those with diverse views to express them, and financial support to a broad range of organisations, many of which had conflicting views. This did not mean he endorsed the opinions of each, they said.