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Reform UK has not shared the addresses of any of its digital crypto ‘wallets’ with the Electoral Commission, drastically limiting the election watchdog’s ability to monitor where Nigel Farage’s party is getting its money from.
Crypto wallets are used for receiving donations in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Tether.
The crypto wallet address is essentially a public ID through which all transactions are recorded on the blockchain, a public ledger showing the movement of crypto funds.
Without the wallet addresses, the Commission cannot conduct any independent verification and is entirely reliant on what Reform chooses to declare about the donations.
Without those addresses the Commission is unable to scrutinise the flow of funds into those wallets to be traced, including information on whether the money originated from overseas sources.
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The Electoral Commission has called on the Government to grant it tough new powers to regulate cryptocurrency donations to political parties, warning that the existing legal framework must be “strengthened to prevent impermissible foreign funds entering the UK system.”
In a statement to Byline Times, the elections body called for powers to set legally-binding guidance over crypto donations, to “match the pace of change, thereby mitigating threats to the security of the UK’s political finance regime.”
The EC is warning that “crypto-asset donations, because of the way they function, do present particular challenges and risks in meeting electoral law requirements in identifying donors and ensuring they are permissible.”
The statement comes in response to our investigation exposing weaknesses in the Polish regulatory regime underpinning Reform UK’s cryptocurrency donation portal.
See No Evil
Reform UK is the only major British political party to accept cryptocurrency donations, but as Byline Times found this week, two other smaller parties are also now doing so. Reform UK’s payment processor, Radom, conducts all crypto operations through a Polish-registered entity that is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
Speaking to Byline Times, a spokesperson for the Electoral Commission suggested that the election finance regulator has requested information from Nigel Farage’s party about how it is receiving donations in cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum), which has not been released.
A representative of the elections body told Byline Times: “Reform has not shared any crypto wallet address with us. We routinely request a variety of information from parties to ensure they are fulfilling their legal responsibilities. We cannot comment any further on the nature of these requests as it may impact our enquiries.”
Crypto Donations Now Accepted by Three UK Parties as Concerns Grow Over Foreign Interference Threat
Reform UK and the far-right Homeland Party are now both accepting cryptocurrency donations, as calls grow for Labour to use its elections bill to secure our democracy
To date, no cryptoasset donations have been reported to the Commission. But cash given to parties under £500 is legally not classed as a reportable donation – a loophole that opens the door to large donations being split into many smaller ones, via cryprocurrency, to avoid transparency.
There is no publicly available information to suggest this has happened yet, but anti-corruption groups and many Labour MPs are calling for much more transparency and even a ban on parties receiving the unregulated currencies.
Reform UK’s crypto payments are processed by Radom Pay in Poland. This makes it hard for regulators to demand records. The Polish regulatory regime through which Radom operates also required no minimum capital, insurance, ownership verification or inspection of actual business operations.
As Byline Times recently revealed, the same regime previously housed a Cambodian crime syndicate sanctioned by the US Treasury for laundering $4 billion in illicit funds – including proceeds from North Korean state-sponsored cyber heists used to finance Pyongyang’s weapons programme.
The EC spokesperson told Byline Times: “For UK crypto payment providers registered with the Financial Conduct Authority, we are able to request details of their customers in a similar way to traditional financial institutions. However, we are limited in the information we can obtain from crypto providers that are based overseas.”
The Electoral Commission carries out ‘permissibility checks’ on donations reported to them, to see if the donor is eligible to vote and donate. That is much more difficult when the Electoral Commission does not even know where Reform receives its crypto donations, nor receive information from the Polish crypto processing firm.
It recently emerged that Nigel Farage has invested £215,000 in former Conservative chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s Bitcoin reserves company, Stack BTC. Crypto firms were prominent sponsors at the party’s last conference.
Reform’s biggest donor – Thailand-based Christopher Harborne – is a major investor in the cryptocurrency Tether, which in turn made a strategic investment in Rumble, a video platform which hosts a Kremlin-backed influence operation exposed by the US Department of Justi