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Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage has repeatedly attacked what he calls “globalist” figures getting involved in British politics.
However, it now emerges that one of the principal funders of Farage’s anti-migrant, anti-EU, anti-human-rights, anti-drugs and anti-globalist party, is a Nigerian-Lebanese billionaire with Irish citizenship who once advised both Amnesty International and the World Economic Forum, and whose overseas fortune stems partly from a cannabis enterprise in South Africa.
Bassim Haidar, a telecoms and fintech magnate whose wealth spans Africa, the Gulf and Europe, is now one of Reform UK’s biggest donors. Between January and April 2025, Electoral Commission filings record four cash donations from him totalling £225,000. These are the first tranches of a £1 million pledge trumpeted from Haidar by the party earlier this year.
His gifts have made him central to Reform’s finances but also emblematic of its contradictions.
Haidar’s public life seems to be a series of sizeable pivots. In November 2024 he told The Telegraph that he had “left” Britain, lamenting that Labour’s abolition of the non-dom tax regime had made the country “no longer interesting” for wealthy investors. “I leave with a very heavy heart,” he said. “It is home in many ways.”
The paper described him selling off his £80 million London property portfolio and relocating to Greece and Dubai. If he had have left, this would be a concern under Electoral Commission rules given his subsequent payments to Reform UK. Foreign political donations are banned in the UK.
There is no suggestion that his donations breach electoral law, however. The Electoral Commission told Byline Times that an individual remains a permissible donor while on the UK electoral register, and Haidar remains so listed. It seems that either Haidar or The Telegraph had trumpeted his imminent departure prematurely.
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Asked for further clarification on some of these points, Haidar responded that “any inaccuracies published about me will be referred to my legal counsel.” Yet the inconsistencies Byline Times sought to resolve originated not in this paper’s reporting but in The Telegraph’s own interview, in which Haidar reportedly claimed to have “left” Britain. The Telegraph also did not respond to this paper’s request for comment.
What we do know is that, almost a year later, Haidar is still listed at his One Hyde Park flat address and so can legally fund Reform UK. Haidar told Byline Times that he remained a UK resident, that his donations were “100 per cent legal and comply with electoral law,” and that he merely “plans to leave sometime in the future, not determined yet.” In other words, the exile had not quite departed.
He has, however, reportedly cancelled plans to list his billion-dollar fintech company, Optasia, on the London Stock Exchange, opting instead for South Africa.
These discrepancies between his public statements prompts questions. Companies House lists his nationality as Irish, yet he was born in Nigeria to Lebanese parents. When Byline Times asked how and when he acquired Irish citizenship (by descent, naturalisation or investment) he declined to comment.
Haidar’s ideological route maps his business trajectory: global in practice, nationalist in political donation. Once a Conservative donor under Rishi Sunak, he later declared that the Conservatives had “lost their way” and shifted allegiance to Farage’s insurgent right, hailing him as the man to restore Britain’s “glory.”
Reform UK has built its identity rejecting the kind of world Haidar represents. It rails against “globalist elites,” calls for the withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and vows to detain and deport migrants “including women and children.” For a Nigerian-born, Irish-passport-holding global businessman to bankroll that message therefore raises eyebrows.
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This is especially the case when we consider that Haidar once served on Amnesty International’s Global Council, an ambassadorial group supporting the organisation’s human-rights advocacy. Reform UK wants to rip up the very frameworks of human rights protection that Amnesty defends.
Bassim Haidar also attended Davos as a participant of the World Economic Forum, which Farage routinely denounces as the symbol of elite “global control.” Haidar now says he resigned from the WEF in 2019 and that his term with Amnesty “expired many years ago.”
The WEF still lists him as a member on its website. Amnesty told Byline Times that “members of the Global Council did not play any role in Amnesty International’s governance or policy-making… Our support for the European Court of Human Rights and the protection of people seeking asylum remain(s) unchanged.”
Then there is cannabis. Through his venture SafriCanna, Haidar invests in medical-cannabis cultivation in South Africa. Reform’s leadership takes a different view to the drug. Nigel Farage has said that cannabis “does more long-term harm than most people realise.”
It may be that Mr Farage’s party finds room for certain kinds of migrants, such as those who arrive by private jet rather than small boat. Haidar owns five luxury boats, and previously owned the yacht on which the late Diana, Princess of Wales, holidayed with Dodi Fayed shortly before her death in 1997.
Reform UK did not respond to Byline Times’ request for comment.
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