The ‘black hole’ in Reform UK’s finances
Plus: We’ve spotted Liz Truss in Davos (again)
It’s been an eventful week. The government’s anti-corruption minister was forced to resign - after being implicated in a corruption investigation in Bangladesh.
Tulip Siddiq’s replacement, Emma Reynolds, is a former corporate lobbyist - who previously petitioned ministers to water down proposed restrictions on Chinese businesses.
That sound you hear is the revolving door spinning furiously…
Today, though, we’re shifting our focus from Labour’s travails to take a deep dive into a subject that we think hasn’t had enough attention: Reform UK’s finances.
But first, a quick update on Britain’s briefest prime minister.
Liz Truss likes to rail against “globalists” and “Davos man” - so we were surprised to discover that she was recently on a junket… to Davos.
Truss is no longer an MP but we have learned that she headed along to the 69th Annual British-Swiss Parliamentary Ski Week in the Swiss resort earlier this month.
Indeed, this newsletter has seen photos of Truss grinning on the Davos slopes, where she was joined by a clutch of British politicians including ex-Tory MP Tim Loughton and Conservative peer Daniel Hannan.
For all her talk of “Davos man”, Truss seems happy to take Davos’s hospitality. As Democracy for Sale previously revealed, last year Truss received over £1,000 in skiing freebies from the Swiss resort last year.
Truss doesn’t have to declare who funded this year’s jolly but we will be watching out for the next drop of the Register of Interests to find out who paid for the current parliamentarians mugging for the camera alongside the only British prime minister to be outlasted in office by a lettuce.
Nigel Farage hasn’t just been making political waves—he’s been making money. The MP for Clacton has been paid a whopping £570,000 since being elected in July.
His outside earnings include £7,888 an hour for promoting gold online and £219,506 for 88 hours presenting on GB News, a heavily loss-making venture that exemplifies how political donation rules can be circumvented.
Looking at Farage’s second jobs—and rumours of Elon Musk ‘privately discussing’ ways to remove Starmer before the next general election—led us to ask: who has funded Reform in the past, and what has Farage’s party done with the money?
And the answers raise serious concerns about how easily transparency and accountability in British politics can be avoided.
Reform UK was registered as a political party in February 2019 under the name “The Brexit Party,” before being rebranded in January 2021. In all, the party has filed five sets of accounts listing total donations of over £23 million.
A few interesting things jump out from Reform’s financial accounts.
Membership Income: Unlike Labour, the Conservatives, and most other parties, Reform has not declared any income from members. This is unlikely, given its membership fees are £25 per year.
The Electoral Commission provides a template for party accounts, but compliance is optional. Reform’s lack of transparency means we have no idea how much they have actually raised from their members - despite all their boasting about now having more members than the Tories.Big Reliance on Big Donors: While Nigel Farage likes to talk up Reform as a party of the people, it’s unusually dependent on a small number of wealthy donors.
Of Reform’s £16.9 million in reportable donations (over £7,500 each) since 2019, a staggering 85% came from just five donors:
Reform UK’s top donors since 2019.
Reform’s big donors will be familiar names to Democracy for Sale readers. Christopher Harborne is a British-born, Thailand-based aviation entrepreneur and crypto investor who gave £10 million to the Brexit Party during the 2019 general election. He has not donated since 2020 but did contribute £1 million to Boris Johnson’s private office.
Jeremy Hosking is a Tory donor who supports various populist-right causes, including Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party and the Critic Magazine.
Formerly known as Leave Means Leave, Britain Means Business was co-founded by former Reform leader Richard Tice. Questions remain about the transfer of the pressure group’s funds to Reform, with another director, Tory donor John Longworth, saying that the money was intended to be separate from the Brexit party.
Of Reform’s other big donors, Fiona Cottrell is the mother of Nigel Farage’s aide George, who has a fraud conviction. David Lilley is a mining and metals trader with Russian business interests.
Reform’s treasurer, Nick Candy, has said he aims to raise millions for the party - and of course Elon Musk has reportedly been hoping to pump $100million into Farage’s party.
3. The ‘black hole’ in Reform’s accounts
Another striking aspect of Reform’s accounts is that they’re reported in a way that breaks no rules but is so opaque that it’s often very hard to understand how much money the party has, or how it spends it.
The best example of this is 2019. This was a landmark year for Reform. The Brexit Party topped polls in the UK’s last European elections and received £17.3 million in donations, according to its accounts. Of this, £11.7 million came from reportable donations, with the rest from “well over 100,000 people, in sizes large and small,” many via PayPal. The Electoral Commission flagged this as a “high risk of accepting illegal funds.”
£17.3 million is a lot, especially for a new party. In 2024, when Reform won five seats in the general election, it reported £2.6 million in donations with the Electoral Commission.
Despite its financial success, Reform’s filings for 2019 show troubling gaps in transparency. For example, the party declared £18.9 million in expenditure. However, over 40% (£7.8 million) was listed as “other expenditure,” with no further explanation.
By contrast, in 2019, Labour listed £1.5million in ‘other’ expenditure on total spending of more than £57 million; the Tories had ‘other’ expenses of £2.5 million in total expenditure of almost £55 million.
Sam Power, an expert in political finance at Bristol University, said that the “black hole” in Reform’s 2019 accounting return “is wholly exceptional in British politics.”
“I’ve never seen spend like that in one year for a (then) minor party with no seats in Parliament,” Power said.
“The current system leaves the door open to malicious compliance whereby people with little interest in being open about finance arrangements can abide by the rules, but in such a way that it doesn't tell us anything about what was actually going on. The Reform Accounts 2019 are a really good example of this,” he added.
Transparency International’s Steve Goodrich echoed these concerns, urging the UK’s elections watchdog to demand fuller financial disclosures from parties.
“The Electoral Commission has the power to require parties to provide a fuller picture of their finances annually, which if used would make it easier to follow the money trail,” Goodrich said.
Reform’s 2019 accounts also suggest unexplained discrepancies in campaign expenditure. The party listed £9.38 million in campaign spending, £400,000 more than it declared to the Electoral Commission for the year’s various elections.
Additionally, the bulk of Reform’s big donations in 2019 came after Farage announced the party would not contest Tory-held seats. Why donors would invest millions in a party that effectively removed itself from contention remains unclear.
Reform did not respond to our detailed questions about its accounts but a party spokesman said that “the British people see through these silly attacks.”
We’re not the only ones asking questions about Reform’s commitment to transparency. Earlier this month ten Reform councillors in Derbyshire resigned citing “a lack of internal democracy” within the party, which is owned by Farage.
What we can say for sure is that within months of the 2019 general election Reform was broke. As Democracy for Sale previously reported, right up until its 2024 successes Reform was reliant on donations from companies controlled by Tice to stay afloat.
Now it looks like Musk and others could be about to plough serious money into Reform - but without changes in how British parties have to account for their spending, we could still be in the dark about how Farage and co. spend any incoming windfall.
Many thanks for this. The fact that Reform were in political partnership with Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party leader Jim Allister from Northern Ireland in the last UK election is not being given enough attention. Allister and his followers are a far more extreme version of the British Unionist Rev. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP): possessing even nastier violent misogynistic views. Elon Musk will be in touch with and funding, through Reform, political associates in Northern Ireland wanting a return to a British Unionist hegemon over the people of Northern Ireland and a hard militarised border. Through his support of Reform /TUV South African born apartheid era Elon Musk is already funding stochastic terrorism in Ireland and risking the reignition of sectarian violence in Ireland. Accordingly, he should be put on a UK/EU terrorist watchlist.