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IMPACT UPDATE: Byline Times investigations have forced the suspension of two Conservative local election candidates after revealing their far-right extremist posts, and our investigation into Reform’s connections to THE COMPANY JCB cited by the Guardian. 05/05/26
Reform UK’s Treasurer and three of the party’s largest donors are all linked to a single London apartment block whose residents and buyers have included at least five sanctioned or Russian-connected billionaires, Byline Times can reveal.
The £1.55 million donated to Reform has come from a series of people and firms tied to One Hyde Park, the Knightsbridge complex the Candy brothers built and marketed as the world’s most expensive luxury residential apartment block in the world.
Nick Candy, who served as the development’s agent, is now Reform UK Treasurer, chief fundraiser and among its largest donors.
The other three – actor Holly Valance, businessman Bassim Haidar and Sotheby’s International Realty – have together given £555,000 since 2024.
The donations make One Hyde Park the most politically generous apartment blocks in the UK per resident. It also houses more individuals associated with Russian, post-Soviet or Kazakh wealth than any other building in the country.
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Reform UK’s Treasurer
Last Christmas week, as London emptied for the holidays, One Hyde Park stood in near-total darkness. Thirteen storeys of black glass against a starless sky, the complex of four towers on the edge of Hyde Park is a monument to corporate opacity; a black hole of overseas capital. Barely a light shone from within, save for a solitary Christmas tree suspended on the seventh floor.
Of the building’s 86 residences, most owners were elsewhere: second homes in Zug, third homes in the Cayman Islands, fourth homes in New York. For the international ultra-wealthy, One Hyde Park functions as a safety-deposit box that comes with property rights.
Nick Candy’s company, Candy & Candy, was development manager and interior designer on One Hyde Park – a joint venture between his brother Christian Candy’s CPC Group and Waterknights, a company controlled by the former Prime Minister of Qatar.
Units sold for between £3 million and £140 million. Marketing materials promised “the pursuit of perfection” and a clientele drawn from the world’s political and commercial elite. How much Nick Candy made from the development has never been made public.
After the 2012 launch of One Hyde Park, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported that nearly 80% of original buyers had purchased through offshore vehicles registered in the British Virgin Islands, Liechtenstein, Liberia, St Vincent and the Isle of Man. The consortium described the clientele as “the obscenely rich” who wished to remain anonymous.
Opaque money flowing through those shell companies underpinned the fortunes of those involved in the sale. Fifteen years on, the question is how directly those profits have translated into wealth deployed in British politics – first through Nick Candy’s donations to the Conservative Party, now through his supercharged funding of Reform UK.
Candy took a penthouse for himself – a duplex with two wine cellars, two underground parking spaces and views across Hyde Park. In 2018, he transferred it to two Guernsey-registered companies he controlled for £160 million, in a move that raised eyebrows in property circles and was recorded as Britain’s highest-ever residential sale. Candy later confirmed it was a refinancing rather than a sale.
In 2017, a former associate, Mark Holyoake, claimed in the High Court in London that the brothers had moved their property business to Guernsey to avoid UK taxes on profits from developments including One Hyde Park. The brothers denied the claim, calling it “slanderous and entirely false”. Mr Justice Nugee dismissed the case.
Seven years on, Nick Candy emerged as one of Reform UK’s single largest donors, giving nearly £1 million according to Electoral Commission records before becoming the party’s treasurer: £490,000 across two tranches in September 2025, and a further £500,000 in instalments between April and June. He pledged to raise tens of millions more.
Byline Times asked Nick Candy to comment on the money he made marketing properties at One Hyde Park, and his subsequent political donations. His office initially asserted its right to “take immediate legal action”, invoking a UK libel regime long favoured by the oligarchs to whom Candy marketed properties. Regardless of the legal position, Candy made substantial money from the building.
A spokesperson for Candy subsequently provided a detailed response: “The attempt to link entirely unrelated matters in this way is misconceived and misleading. There is no basis whatsoever for suggesting any connection between historic, lawful real estate activity relating to One Hyde Park and Mr Candy’s current political involvement. One Hyde Park was completed over 15 years ago, and for the avoidance of doubt, Mr Candy was not the developer of One Hyde Park; his company, Candy & Candy, acted as development manager and interior designer on the project. Reform UK was not founded until 2021 – more than a decade after the building’s completion – making any retrospective linkage particularly tenuous. Mr Candy was also a supporter and donor to the Conservative Party at the time.
“Mr Candy has always conducted his business and personal affairs in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. His political activities and donations are entirely lawful, transparent, and properly declared. Any suggestion to the contrary is entirely false.”
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Holly Valance
The second donor connected to the building is the Australian actor and former pop singer Holly Valance – best known for playing Felicity ‘Flick’ Scully in Neighbours and for her 2002 number one hit ‘Kiss Kiss’ – who was married to Candy until last year. One Hyde Park has been reported as part of their shared property holdings; they reportedly lived there together for five years.
During their marriage, Valance gave Reform UK £100,000 in two £50,000 payments in June 2024, using her maiden name Vukadinović for the donations. She has been pictured with Farage and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, attended Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom march, and collaborated with the Australian far-right politician Pauline Hanson on an “anti-woke” song.
Candy drew media coverage when he joked at a wealth management conference that he spent 20 days a year in his £175 million penthouse and resented the £161,000 annual service charge. He later said he was “being facetious”, had moved out, and was living with Valance in Chelsea while the penthouse stood empty. They divorced a few months later.
Valance did not respond to questions from Byline Times.
Bassim Haidar
Bassim Haidar, a Lebanese-Nigerian-Irish businessman who owns an apartment in One Hyde Park, has given Reform UK £355,000 across six contributions between January and September 2025.
He also paid £55,000 for Farage and two team members to travel to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in November 2025 for a speaking engagement and a veterans event.
Haidar, who made his fortune in telecoms and fintech across Nigeria, South Africa and the Gulf, was reported in November 2024 to have left the UK for Monaco or Dubai, blaming punitive taxation. He remains on the Westminster electoral register.
Haidar’s past sits uneasily with Reform UK’s populist nationalism. He has served on Amnesty International’s Global Council, invests in medical cannabis ventures, and has attended the World Economic Forum at Davos – the globalist milieu Farage’s rhetoric excoriates. Modern populism is riddled with such dissonance: movements that rail against international elites while depending on their chequebooks.
Asked about the facts published in a previous Byline Times article, Haidar said: “Any inaccuracies published about me will be referred to my legal counsel.”
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Sotheby’s International Realty
The fourth connection is Sotheby’s International Realty. The luxury broker, currently selling five One Hyde Park units worth £244 million combined – including Nick Candy’s own £175 million penthouse – donated £100,000 to Reform UK in August 2025.
Candy has described the link between One Hyde Park and his role as Reform UK’s treasurer as “tenuous”. Sotheby’s is nonetheless marketing his £175 million flat while donating to the party he now directs.
The firm is marketing trophy assets to foreign buyers whose access to Britain Reform UK’s platform – curbing immigration, restoring national sovereignty – would seek to limit. Sotheby’s did not respond to questions from Byline Times.
Russian-Linked Owners At Same Address
No wrongdoing is implied against any donor. But the building’s other buyers place those donations in striking company.
Ekaterina Fedun reportedly owns a flat there. She is the daughter of Leonid Fedun, co-founder of the Russian oil company Lukoil. He sold his roughly $7 billion stake in late 2025. He remains outside Western sanctions, but his fortune was built in Russia’s state-dominated oil sector.
Alexander Ponomarenko, who made his fortune in banking, shipping and infrastructure and later chaired Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, was placed under UK and EU sanctions after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Telegraph claims he is the beneficial owner of a £60 million apartment in the building, acquired in 2011 through a British Virgin Islands offshore company that obscures the ultimate owner.
Temur Akhmedov, son of the sanctioned Russian-based oligarch Farkhad Akhmedov, was gifted a £29 million apartment at the building in 2013, aged 19, registered through an offshore company. Farkhad Akhmedov built his fortune in post-Soviet oil and gas – notably through a stake in the Russian gas company Northgas, sold for more than $1 billion after years of dealings with Gazprom. In 2021, a London court ordered Temur to pay his mother more than $100 million after finding he had helped his father conceal assets to avoid a £450 million divorce settlement.
“Temur has learned well from his father’s past conduct and has done and said all he could to prevent his mother receiving a penny of the matrimonial assets,” the judge said. Farkhad Akhmedov moved to Russia after the initial divorce order in 2016.
Michel Litvak, born in Leningrad before emigrating to Belgium in 1962, built major commercial links between Russia and China and pioneered private logistics for the Russian energy sector through OTЭKO Group, including a large Black Sea port at Taman. In 2018, Private Eye reported that he was a resident at One Hyde Park.
Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, paid £136 million in 2011 for combined penthouses through a British Virgin Islands shell company – then the highest price ever paid for a British home. Only after the 2022 Economic Crime Act did Companies House records list executives from Akhmetov’s football club as the beneficial owners. Since 2014, and especially after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Akhmetov has publicly broken business ties with Russia, condemned the Kremlin, and pursued legal claims against Moscow over seized assets. In 2011, however, his wealth was in significant part derived from Russian-linked coal assets and industrial holdings.
A Chinese Ownership Puzzle
The questions extend beyond Russia.
In 2011, a British Virgin Islands company called Giant Bloom International purchased a major apartment in the block for £60 million. In mid-2025, the Chinese state-owned entity Shenzhen Fuguo Anbang Investment Ltd filed a claim in the BVI High Court against Giant Bloom to recover assets. The owner of Giant Bloom is a Chinese national, Liu Jianming. But the action being brought by an Anbang-named entity raises the question of whether the property is linked to the former Chinese financier Wu Xiaohui.
Xiaohui is the disgraced former chairman of the Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese conglomerate that once held almost $300 billion in assets and trophy properties including New York’s Waldorf Astoria. Chinese authorities convicted him of fraud and embezzlement in 2018, sentencing him to 18 years for misappropriating more than $10 billion.
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Kazakh Wealth
Kazakhstan’s elite have also used One Hyde Park to hold their wealth.
Kairat Boranbayev, a former gas executive and one-time in-law of former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, purchased an entire ninth-floor flat – unusually, in his own name. A Kazakh court convicted him of large-scale embezzlement in March 2023; his sentence was later reduced and he was released. His ownership of the flat was raised by Dame Margaret Hodge in a 2022 House of Commons debate on anti-corruption, when she called for sanctions against him.
Camilla Kim, daughter of Kazakh billionaire Vladimir Kim, was reportedly gifted three London apartments in 2017 on her 18th birthday, worth about £41.5 million combined – two near Hyde Park, the third inside One Hyde Park itself. Vladimir Kim’s fortune was built through the privatisation of Soviet-era copper assets consolidated into Kazakhmys, a mining group long scrutinised over its opaque ownership. Global Witness noted in 2011 that “Vladimir Kim earned over US$32m in dividends, nearly US$30m of which would have gone through a trust in Liechtenstein”.
Opaque Kazakh wealth has reached the heart of Reform UK. Farage’s 2026 Davos trip was funded by the London-based HP Trust, the family office of venture capitalist Sasan Ghandehari, whose fortune derives from his mother, the late Kazakh-born billionaire Hourieh Peramaa.
Reform UK’s Central Contradiction
Westminster has begun tightening the rules around foreign money in British politics. The 2022 Economic Crime Act compels overseas property owners to disclose their controllers. In March 2026 the Government announced a ban on cryptocurrency donations and a £100,000 cap on contributions from British citizens abroad. The donations linked to One Hyde Park fall outside these limits.
One Hyde Park is a prism through which the contradictions of Reform UK become visible. Within a single block sit the proceeds of post-Soviet privatisations, opaque offshore finance and sanctioned wealth – alongside the individuals and firms now helping bankroll a movement whose leader publicly condemns the “global elites”.
Nick Candy’s connection is the most substantive. Closely involved in the launch, he saw record-breaking sales to a largely offshore buyer pool – transactions that set benchmarks feeding back into the building’s wider valuation. Valance, his then wife, stood to benefit in the same way. Sotheby’s benefits from agency fees on flat sales. Haidar’s principal connection is as a neighbour to Russian oligarchs.
All four have donated to a party that claims to challenge globalisation and foreign influence in Britain – yet is in part sustained by both. Reform UK’s rhetoric is national, even nativist. Its funding, like the wealth behind the darkened glass of One Hyde Park, is unmistakably ‘globalist’.
Nick Candy stands out in this context. On the available evidence, he has done business with individuals whose pasts might politely be called colourful.
Byline Times can confirm that in 2014 – six years after Jeffrey Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor – Nick Candy travelled to New York to view the financier’s Manhattan townhouse as a potential purchaser. The visit took place in Epstein’s absence.
Files released under the Epstein Transparency Act by the US Justice Department confirm that four years earlier, in 2010, Epstein had approached Candy & Candy to explore buying property in London. Neither resulted in any transactions. There is no suggestion of criminal wrongdoing on Candy’s part.
What’s clear is that Reform UK’s treasurer built his career marketing properties to the very ‘globalist elites’ its leader denounces. This is the contradiction at the heart of the party’s pitch for moral and political renewal.
Reform UK did not respond to requests for comment.
Iain Overton is Executive Director of Action on Armed Violence and the author of ‘The Price of Paradise’