Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party secured a second big donation from crypto investor Christopher Harborne, helping it raise more money than its rivals last year in a sign that business donors are responding to the party’s polling lead.
Reform raised 5.5 million pounds ($7.4 million) in the fourth quarter of last year, helped by a 3-million-pound donation from Harborne, the Electoral Commission said on Thursday.
This came after Harborne gave the party 9 million pounds in the previous quarter, the biggest single donation to a British political party by a living donor.
The donations mean Reform received more than 18 million pounds in cash donations last year, more than double the 8.1 million taken in by the governing Labour Party and the 13.4 million raised by the opposition Conservative Party.
The figures exclude the public funding given to parties.
Farage, a veteran Brexit campaigner and friend of U.S. President Donald Trump, is on a mission to professionalise the party before the next national election, due in 2029.
Although Reform UK only holds eight of the 650 seats in Britain’s parliament, Farage’s party has topped national opinion polls since early last year and hopes to triumph in another round of local elections in May, including votes for the devolved parliaments of Scotland and Wales.
Two thirds of Reform’s funding last year came from Harborne, who has declared in legal filings he held a 12% stake in crypto exchange Bitfinex, which shares a parent company with Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer.
During the last quarter of last year, the longtime Conservative donor Anthony Bamford also made a 200,000-pound donation to Reform through his company J.C Bamford Excavators Ltd.
Reform also received 260,000 pounds from David Grainger, the co-founder of an investment firm focused on the life sciences sector, and 250,000 pounds from double glazing entrepreneur Gary Dutton.
($1 = 0.7488 pounds)
(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill）
