Reform's Dubious Donations
PART ONE
When I started writing this article I naively thought that it could be a one-and-done feature, but, as things moved along, it transpired that there is too much information to fit into one piece. So this is Part One.
With all the farrago surrounding Farage and Reform UK at the moment, I thought it may behoove us to have a cautious look at donations to that particular political party/Limited Company.
Farage recently announced1 that, ex-husband of Holly Valance, Nick Candy, had donated £1,000,000 to Reform UK — you can insert the Dr Evil.gif in your own heads at this point. At the same time, the Observer’s excellent Whitehall Editor, Cat Neilen wrote a piece about the very first crypto donation to a UK party — understood to be Reform UK.
In the UK, there are rules and regulations that political parties must follow in order to preserve transparency. One of these rules is the declaration of all donations and loans to a party — any money received, MUST be logged with the Electoral Commission, who, in turn, publishes a quarterly update on its website for the public to read.
This takes the shape of a spreadsheet and is often a source of news to political journos as it highlights donations received, how much they were, and from whom they came. It’s a rare source of light shone into the murky world of party politics. It is supposed to pair with an MP’s Register of Interests on the Parliament website, giving, in theory, total financial transparency throughout a party and its elected members.
But does it really?
I wrote, ad nauseam, in September about Nigel Farage’s lack of declarations to his Register of Interests. He, to date, still has a gap of five months on his record, so it shows that the system isn’t quite robust enough. When Boris Johnson was under scrutiny and failed to declare to his Register, he was made to apologise to the House and correct the record, and even attend remedial training. It seems as though Farage has dodged another bullet, and escaped, scot-free, with this lapse.
So let’s look at the reason we’re here … donations to Reform UK.
At this point, I’d like to thank an intrepid 𝕏 friend who has been doggedly helping me with this and sending me lots of data that will follow in the coming paragraphs. He does not want to be identified, and so I shall refer to him as Mr. 𝕏!
It’s fortunate that I enjoy working with spreadsheets, as most of this data comes from csv downloads that I have converted and analysed; there has even been the use of pivot tables, something I haven’t wrestled with in a while.
For example, here are the entries that my pivot table extracted for Christopher Harborne — Reform’s largest donor by far. You can read more about Harborne in a previous article:
You’ll notice there are six entries at the bottom that don’t have dates attached — a total of £3,525,000. Reform seems to have forgotten when Harborne made these donations; not dissimilar to Farage’s forgotten Register declarations.
When looking through the database from the Electoral Commission, I have sorted and filtered by various different headings, to give a slightly different perspective each time. For example, if I sort by donor name, we can see those who have contributed on multiple occasions. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Firstly, I was drawn to a company called Britain Means Business Ltd. They have donated ten times to Reform UK for a grand total of £1,154,919.17. The database is missing dates from two of the largest donations, both for a quarter of a million pounds each. These donations have consecutive EC Ref numbers, however, so we can assume that they came in, one after the other. In the table, the EC Ref numbers put them between May 2022 and June 2024. Perhaps two big donations were needed in the run-up to the General Election in 2024?
Before moving on, it makes sense for us to look at who this company is; who is behind it, and what does it do?
It turns out to be one of many companies belonging to Richard Tice — current director of Reform UK Ltd and, as of last week, new head of DOGE. It’s a miracle that he can fit in time for his actual job as an MP. As you can see from the Companies House snapshots above, the business used to be called Leave Means Leave but then changed its name in 2020 to Britain Means Business and has been busy funnelling cash to Reform ever since. This will not be the last mention of Tice in this article.
So, without wanting to get bogged down in pivot tables, I’m going to move onto some names of people on Reform UK’s donations list that are, let’s say … worth a look at.
We’ll begin with Atmospheric Studios Limited. This short-lived business was set up in 2022 with one pound in assets and dissolved on the 14th of October 2025. It appears to have very little, if any, in the way of trade, and only submitted one set of accounts to Companies House in the three years it was functioning. Those showed a total cash in the bank of £140 and debts of £1,312,669. This was in December of 2023. Nothing else has been declared and, from myself and Mr. 𝕏’s digging, we cannot find anything else on this company.
They donated twice, on the same date, £10,000 to Reform UK.
Legal? Yes. Questionable, while the company is in over a million pounds worth of debt? Definitely.
One of the listed directors has a number of other companies and runs other ‘global capital’ businesses, one of which went bankrupt; so what was the deal with Atmospheric Studios Limited? Unclear, and as it has now been dissolved owing a great deal of money, we won’t ever know.
Moving on to another of Mr. 𝕏’s interesting donations — Albany Walk Limited. Another company that, whilst in masses of debt, found themselves able to throw Reform UK a great deal of cash — £15,000 in this instance in 2019. According to Companies House, they were over half a million pounds in debt at that point, but they felt it a priority to donate thousands to Reform UK. Again, there is no suggestion of wrongdoing, but it feels … off.
In a strange twist of fate, it transpires that the director of Albany Walk Ltd, Robert Rowland, was actually an MEP for the Brexit Party in 2019 and 2020. So at the time of his donation, he was actually working for Nigel Farage in Brussells.
At this point, it may be prudent to explain the previous incarnation of Reform UK: the Brexit Party, as it was known until 2021, was Nigel Farage’s EU protest party. It was founded in order to bring the years of wrangling about the UK’s Brexit deal, to an end. It came after Nigel Farage left UKIP declaring it ‘too focused on anti-Islam rhetoric’ — with no hint of irony whatsoever.
Farage decided to row back on his promise to stand candidates in the 2019 General Election and handed those Brexit supporting seats to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, who won a landslide victory.
When the UK finally officially left the EU in 2020, the Brexit Party was defunct and rebranded into what we now know as Reform UK.
A great many of the donations on the Electoral Commission spreadsheet pre-date Reform as an entity, but the common denominator is always: money flows → to Nigel Farage.
Right, back to some more donors, I’ll get through a few people included in Mr. 𝕏’s list.
Harvey Boulter — donated £10,000 on two occasions in 2020. Mr Boulter is a British Venture Capitalist billionaire with an intriguing past. He was involved in the Adam Werrity2 scandal that led to Liam Fox resigning his position as Minister for Defence in 2011. Boulter’s foray into the field of biological warfare saw him become a major player at Porton Down — the government’s top secret biolab.
The much darker information surrounding this donor to Reform comes as news from Namibia, where, as far as I can tell, Harvey Boulter is still considered the only suspect in the murder of Gerhard van Wyk in 2021. Van Wyk was employed by Boulter on his Namibian farm and was shot dead during a barbecue — Boulter was arrested and charged with the murder. This case is still going through appeals and, as far as I know, has not been to trial and, the most recent news I can find, seems to indicate that the Namibian Supreme Court has dismissed Boulter’s appeal to avoid prosecution. That was posted on 20th October 2025.
Apropos of nothing, Reform UK and Leave.eu funder extraordinaire, Arron Banks, according to reports in 2018, had allegedly secured potential opportunities in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Botswana and Namibia.3
Boulter continues to be mired in scandal and court cases, having to hand over millions to settle a court case earlier this year, when a group of Saudi businesses won a case in the Namibian High court against Boulter.4
There is absolutely no implication that Boulter’s donation to Reform UK was illegal, but it’s another unscrupulous character handing money to Farage.
Next up — Techtest Limited and HR Smith Group.
These two companies are one and the same — manufacturing and producing component parts for the aerospace industry, including the military. In March of 2025 it was reported in the New York Times5 that the company had supplied components, specifically transmitters, cockpit equipment, antennas and other sensitive technology, to a major supplier of Moscow’s blacklisted state weapons agency, in India.
In terms of their donations to Reform UK, they look like this.
Aside from the possible links to Russia, the director of said businesses, Richard Smith, is the owner of a very well known, and politically connected, building in London — but back to that in a sec.
In the report, it makes clear that HR Smith deny any links to Russia and that their parts are only intended for Indian use:
H.R. Smith Group said that its sales were lawful and that the equipment was destined for an Indian search-and-rescue network. The parts “support lifesaving operations” and are “not designed for military use,” said Nick Watson, a lawyer for the company.
It carries on to say that, despite HR Smith’s protestations, “in some instances, the Indian company received equipment from H.R. Smith and, within days, sent parts to Russia with the same identifying product codes.”.
Murky grey zone stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.
So what of this building in London that belongs to the owner of these companies? If I said 55 Tufton Street, are you recoiling in shock? Or, like most of us that follow politics closely, shrugging as if to say “yeah, sure, of course it is”?
Richard Smith is/was reportedly a trustee of Politics and Economics Research Trust — a think tank that was under investigation surrounding its awarding of money to pro-Brexit campaign groups. This was one of many groups headed up by Matthew Elliot. If that name sounds familiar, then it should. Elliot, amongst many, many other things, was the CEO of Vote Leave, the founder of the Tax Payers Alliance and founder of Conservative Friends of Russia.
Reform UK received £200,000 in donations from these two businesses and as is starting to become clear, were hoovering up Tory donors, long before we were publicly aware. Tufton Street, once the go-to shop for Tory MPs for their talking points, has been subjected to an internal coup by Reform UK it seems — making a great deal more sense as to how they have such a hold on our broadcast media. That particular address has been pumping out right-wing propaganda for some time.
That’s going to be enough for Part One. This is long enough already, and I have barely made a dent in the list of donors that Mr. 𝕏 has delivered to my inbox.
Part Two will follow along soon and, as I’ve already set up the background in this bit, will crash headlong into more donors and their ‘interesting’ backgrounds. If you think the last few were juicy, you ain’t seen nothing yet! Let’s just say that the word ‘Russia’ appears … a lot.
See you in Part Two.
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Source: New York Times
Reform/Brexit party very dubious funding, erring on being an OCG.
Reform’s funding comes from crypto billionaires, companies with negative bank balances, a man currently avoiding a murder trial in Namibia, and a military supplier whose products accidentally fell into Russia.
If this financial spreadsheet was any dodgier, it would be running a three-card monte stall on Westminster Bridge.
Bring on Part Two. I’ll bring the popcorn; someone else bring the extradition treaties.