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It’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid Reform UK Party Limited’s leader Richard Tice, its unofficial doyen-at-large Nigel Farage, and Tice’s deputy Benyamin ‘Ben’ Habib.
On 4th January 2021, the Brexit party’s name change to Reform UK was approved by the Electoral Commission. For a party that in the 2023 UK local elections averaged 6% of the vote in the wards where it stood and won just six seats out of the 8,519 up for election, national media coverage of Reform was – and is – highly disproportionate.
Farage and Tice have their own shows on GB News, which is bankrolled by billionaire hedge-funder Paul Marshall and Dubai-based investment company Legatum, founded by New Zealand billionaire Christopher Chandler who made a fortune in Russian gas in the 1990s.
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GB News feels increasingly like a space to present uninterrupted Party-Political Broadcasts. That’s despite UK broadcast rules, supposedly enforced by Ofcom, which state that broadcasters – including GB News – must ensure ‘adequate and appropriate levels of due impartiality in its presentation of matters of political controversy and current public policy.’ In December 2023, GB News breached the Ofcom code for the fifth time, and 12 further Ofcom investigations are currently open into the channel.
Reform ‘Honorary President’ and, according to several reports, its controlling majority shareholder, Nigel Farage, received a great deal of media exposure during last year’s I’m a Celebrity and during the Coutts ‘debanking’ affair.
Reform Leader Richard Tice and co-Deputy Leader, Ben Habib are regularly invited onto national broadcast flagship news and politics shows on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky. All three tend to appear in the pages of the billionaire-owned UK national press every week, and in addition, on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), they tweet regularly to their combined two million followers.
But what – and who – is propelling the group?
Directing Reform
Despite receiving more than £10 million pounds in donations over the past four years, Reform Treasurer and Secretary, Mehrtash A’Zami, stated at the end of 2022 that Reform had net liabilities of more than £1 million, “a significant percentage of which comes from Director’s loans”.
According to Companies House, there are currently just three active directors: Tice, Farage, and Reform CEO, ex-UKIP Chairman Paul Oakden, who has stated that he is worried about the supposed “globalist totalitarian” approach of both Labour and the Conservatives.
In 2008, Oakden became parliamentary agent for then Tory MP, Andrew Bridgen, but was fired after eight weeks, in part for allegedly ‘spending most of his time on a dating site’. A 2016 article in The Sun claims Bridgen had said about Oakden that ‘he shouldn’t be in politics’, branding him a ‘political suicide bomber’.
Since his dramatic exit as UKIP Chairman in February 2018 – unlike his Reform colleagues – Oakden has kept a very low profile.
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Reform’s Major Donors
We know from the Electoral Commission donations database that to date, Jeremy Hosking has donated £2,578,000 to Reform UK, giving more than £6 million in total to right-wing parties, including the Conservatives, and since 2019, around £3.5 million to Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party.
Another major donor to Reform is ex-Bullingdon Club member George Farmer (£200,000 in 2019). Ex-hedge-funder Brextremist George Farmer, the former CEO of far-right platform Parler and former Chair of far-right group Turning Point UK – endorsed by Farage, Priti Patel, and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
He’s married to controversial US political commentator Candace Owens, who caused controversy when in December 2018 at a TPUK launch event in London she made comments about Hitler, saying that it would have been “okay” if he had just wanted to “make Germany great”. In September 2023, Farmer joined the board of GB News.
By far the biggest single Reform donor is Chris Harborne, who according to Electoral Commission records has now given around £10 million to the Brexit/Reform party. Harborne made his fortune in aviation fuel and tech investing, and made multiple appearances in the Panama Papers.
Harborne is based in Thailand, holding Thai citizenship under the name Chakrit Sakunkrit. Like Farage, Tice, and Habib, Harborne was privately educated. He worked for five years as a management consultant at McKinsey and is now CEO of Sherriff Global Group which trades in private planes, and owns AML Global, a firm that sells aviation fuel.
In March 2023, it was reported that Harborne, who had also given £1 million to the office of former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, had helped crypto “stablecoin” operator Tether circumvent a block on access to the US banking system.
In November 2021 crypto news site Protos said Harborne had received more than $70 million in Tether tokens in early 2019. These tokens were allegedly paid to an account in the name of an alternative Thai identity held by Harborne, “Chakrit Sakunkrit”. According to Protos, shortly after receiving the Tether tokens, Harborne made large donations to pro-Brexit political parties in the UK.
