Tether Stakeholder Gave Farage Undisclosed $6.7M Gift Amid Reform UK Crypto Funding Scrutiny

In brief

• Christopher Harborne, who holds a 12% stake in Tether, gave Nigel Farage an undisclosed £5 million personal gift in 2024.
• The payment was intended to cover security costs for the Reform UK leader, Farage said.
• The revelation emerges weeks after the UK banned political crypto donations over transparency concerns.

Christopher Harborne, a billionaire with a 12% stake in USDT stablecoin issuer Tether, gave Nigel Farage a previously undisclosed $6.7 million (£5 million) gift in 2024.

The donation, first reported in The Guardian, was to pay for his personal security, Farage later told The Daily Telegraph.

The payment was reportedly structured as a personal gift and was never officially disclosed under UK campaign finance laws. At the time Farage received the gift, he had not announced plans to run as a Member of Parliament; he subsequently ran for and won the seat of Clacton.

The gift is separate from Harborne's £12 million in donations to the Reform UK party itself. Previous disclosures show Harborne made a £9 million donation last year—the UK's biggest-ever political donation at the time—and a further £3 million contribution revealed in March.

Crypto political funding in the UK

While neither of Harborne’s donations to Reform UK were made in the form of cryptocurrency, they have added to mounting scrutiny over the role of the crypto industry in political funding in the UK—which Harborne’s gift to Farage will do nothing to dispel.

Last month, the UK government announced an immediate moratorium on crypto assets as a form of political financing, following the government-commissioned Rycroft review into foreign electoral interference.