The Walls Close in on Nigel Farage

The party's dark crypo network is finally coming to light

*A modified version of this article first appeared in Byline Times

Reform UK is finally the subject of sustained public examination from mainstream journalists, regulators and official watchdogs. The true size and shape of the party’s crypto funding network is finally being excavated.

The latest scrutiny centres around ‘Posh George’ Cottrell, a convicted fraudster, crypto entrepreneur and Reform insider that Byline Times revealed as the Brexit Party’s de facto treasurer back in 2019.

Authorities have confirmed that there are ongoing investigations into Cottrell’s financial relationship with Reform UK. We now know that the Met Police have reportedly spent over a year probing at least £500,000 in donations from Fiona Cottrell (mother of George) to the party, following suspicions that she could be a proxy for an impermissible source of funds.

On top of that, the National Crime Agency (NCA) has reportedly received multiple suspicious activity reports relating to millions of pounds in transactions to organisations operated by deputy leader Richard Tice.

Pressed with questions about the Met’s investigation, Tice has presented himself and his party as being victims of a “politically motivated smear campaign,” claiming that “this is about the establishment trying to kill off a disruptive political party.”

Ironically, in the same breath, Tice came off like a paid-up member of Britain’s establishment. My family have known the Cottrell family for 50 years,” he said. “They’re a very successful aristocratic family.

According to the Guardian’s City Editor Anna Issac, Tice threatened the paper with an injunction to stop it publishing details of the NCA flagging. He appears to have swiftly sent over the newspaper’s allegations put to him – without answering any queries – directly to The Telegraph, who promptly wrote them up as an apparent spoiler of their story.

Isabel Oakeshott, Tice’s partner and the international editor of Murdoch-owned Talk TV, was flummoxed when she was informed of the investigation. Describing the revelations as “concerning,” Oakeshott just repeated Tice’s line: “Richard has said that he has known the Cottrell family for some fifty years.”

In truth, though, Cottrell – described in The Sunday Times as a “fixer-cum-financier to the ultra-rich in Mayfair” whose wealth “derives from crypto” – is just one tile in a much larger dark money mosaic.

There’s also the Christopher Harborne fiasco – a £5 million gift from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire that coincided with a pro-crypto policy push from Reform UK and apparently an effort to directly lobby the governor of the Bank of England towards policies that would benefit the crypto industry.

The Parliamentary investigation into the gift looms over Farage’s abrupt resignation and decision to stand again in Clacton (against Count Binface).

But the crypto ties keep piling up.

Another non-dom crypto billionaire, founder of BitMEX trading platform Ben Delo, has also given Reform UK £4 million. Delo pleaded guilty to wilfully violating US anti-money laundering rules before being pardoned by President Trump.

Earlier this year, Farage invested £215,000 in Stack BTC, a UK-listed bitcoin treasury firm where former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng serves as executive chair. Farage took a 6.3% stake, later fronting a £2m corporate bitcoin purchase in a promotional video, which prompted the Liberal Democrats to demand a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) probe.

And of course Nathan Gill – Farage’s confidante sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for taking pro-Kremlin bribes – was arrested en route to a conference of “political technologists” in Moscow where he was set to present on the role of crypocurrencies in politics.

Navigating the labyrinth of influence and financial connections beneath the surface of Reform UK, cryptocurrency really does seem to appear at every turn. The industry on its facade promises to usher in the utopian and democratic future of finance, but in practice it has become a magnet for opaque wealth, regulatory arbitrage and clandestine political influence.

It’s a natural link in a sense. Farage’s party is an elite-led and funded political project promising a populist anti-establishment revolt, just as crypto is an elite-led and funded financial project promising a decentralised revolution overturning the financial system. Both have taken genuine frustrations and sublimated them towards their own agendas.

But as ever, Farage is a stress-test for our political system. This litany of scandals, which took years to fully emerge, goes to show that our entire political finance system is completely unfit for purpose.

They’re just a symptom of the real problem. Big money has subsumed modern politics, with significant portions of it originating from nebulous or unknown sources.

Off the back of the Rycroft review, the Government has announced what they say are “tough new rules to crack down on foreign money in UK elections.”

It includes a new timebound cap on donations from those who move to the UK from overseas (potentially impacting donors like Harborne and Delo who may seek to return to Britain in light of other rules limiting donations for non-doms), tougher checks on company donations to ensure only “legitimate UK-linked” businesses can donate, and new requirements for candidates to prove funding comes from legitimate sources.

But this whack-a-mole approach of targeting specific donors and types of donations (while welcome) will still allow money to slip through the cracks. We need a funding system that rewards parties for building broad public backing, not one that leaves them dependent on a small number of exceptionally wealthy individuals. Democracy works best when political support is broad-based, not bankrolled.

Andy Pryce, a recently retired diplomat who spent a decade tracking Russian influence operations, warns that it would only cost roughly £25 million for a hostile foreign state to buy an election.

Reform has so far raised more than £30 million in declared donations since 2024. It is vital that – at the very least – the party should be able to demonstrate exactly where all of that money came from.