Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Funded by Tax Haven Linked Firms as Party Seeks Tax Exile Donors

Reform UK took a donation from a company with ties to tax havens, newly released data reveals, as the party seeks out donations from Brits living overseas who are disgruntled with the current UK tax regime. 

Nick Candy, Reform UK’s treasurer told the New York Times “We are going to have fund-raisers all over the world, in every part of the world where there are British nationals.

“We will have fund-raisers in the US, in Monaco, and we will have huge fund-raisers in the UAE, where we have an expat community there who are unhappy with the amount of regulation and tax in the UK.”

Newly released date reveals that Reform UK received £50,000 from JB Honore Drax, a brokerage firm specialising in foreign exchange trades, derivatives and swaps.

JB Honore Drax has a subsidiary in Singapore and is owned by a parent company based in Luxembourg according to a brokercheck report by the company Finra. Filings with the Paris business court also suggest that the French branch of the firm is owned by the company in Luxembourg and the firm’s Dubai branch is listed as active on the Legal Entity Identifier in Luxembourg.

Although JB Honore Drax is primarily owned by its directors Benn Shepherd and Jonathan Glassberg, the Australian investment bank Macquarie is a minority shareholder. Macquarie was named in a 2014 leak of tax deals from companies operating in Luxembourg and the firm has come under fire for its role in the privatisation of Thames Water after it loaded the company with debt during the period of its partial ownership. The firm is also among a consortium of lenders to Thames Water’s parent company. 

One of the firm’s co-CEOs, Benn Shepherd, is also the director of Cadrela, a firm domiciled in Malta.

This is not the first time Reform UK has taken donations from firms linked to offshore entities. In 2024 Good Law Project revealed that 73.5% of Reform’s donations since 2019 were linked to nine companies and individuals with offshore interests. The continued reliance on donors with links to offshore tax havens calls into question Reform UK’s presentation as a patriotic party.

Another of Reform’s donations from the last quarter of 2024 came from Roger Nagioff, a former Conservative donor based out of Monaco, which is a tax haven.

Although he now runs JRJ group, a private investment firm, the former derivatives trader once headed up the European division of Lehman brothers, the bank whose collapse triggered the financial crisis between 1997 and 2008.

A report in the Guardian in 2008 notes that Nagioff’s appointment as global head of the firm’s fixed income division in 2007 signalled the dominance of the freewheeling attitude to derivatives trading that would later blow up the financial system. Nagioff replaced Michael Gelband who was ousted from Lehman for opposing the purchase of a huge collection of subprime mortgage lenders – the kind that caused the crash. 

“Dick Fuld, the chairman and chief executive of Lehman Brothers, told his PR minders to portray the appointment as a sign of how his booming empire had broadened into a truly global operation” the Guardian reported. Nagioff gave Reform UK £100,000 in December 2024.

Reform UK’s strategy of seeking out offshore donors may be about to step up. Open Democracy recently reported that George Cottrell, Farage’s youthful multimillionaire fundraiser and advisor, has set up an unlimited company Geostrategy International. Its status as an unlimited company means that it does not have to declare accounts, but can still make political donations which the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption warned means it could be “easily abused” to provide a “backdoor for illegal donations”. 

“Far-right parties have historically struggled to fundraise because of the deep reputational damage that financing them can cause. Take for example the consumer boycott of Tesla, sparked by Elon Musk’s alliance with US President Donald Trump. This is the result that these companies are attempting to avoid”, said Connor Mulhern, the lead researcher for the Reactionary International research consortium.

“Likewise, mainstream political parties do not want to risk the reputational damage caused by being financed by offshore interests, so the overlap leads to a perfect marriage where supposedly far-right ‘populist’ parties heavily rely on opaque and unpopular forms of funding”. 

Neither Reform UK nor JB Drax Honore replied to requests for comment. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by any of the companies or individuals mentioned.