Christopher Harborne: Reform UK donor and crypto billionaire

Christopher Harborne donated £9 million to Nigel Farage's Reform UK

(Image credit: Lesley Martin / AFP via Getty Images)

In 2008, a light aircraft crash-landed into a garden in Highclere, Hampshire. Both the pilot, Christopher Harborne, and the householders counted themselves lucky to have survived. Two years later, in a strange twist of fate, a plane carrying Nigel Farage plummeted to the ground after getting wrapped in a banner it was flying, says the Financial Times. “Both men suffered injuries, both recovered. And both are now trying to overturn Britain’s political order.”

Reform UK’s new mega-donor – a Thai-based aviation entrepreneur turned crypto tycoon – is rarely seen with Farage in public. He keeps a low profile. But long before he coughed up a record £9 million in a donation revealed this week, he had maintained a discreet presence as a key backer of Farage. Ahead of the 2019 European elections, he installed himself in the then Brexit Party’s campaign HQ – ordering in a coffee machine, a supply of gin, tonic and limes, and some “decent tumblers”, says The New Statesman.

UK public support for a hard Brexit that year saw the party, somewhat ironically, become the largest single national party in the European Parliament. Now Harborne is fully behind Farage’s quest to repeat the trick at Westminster. Farage’s big challenge at the moment is fighting claims in the press that as a schoolboy he was a racist bully. But the “slightly geeky” Cambridge engineering graduate sees political problems more as “a mathematical equation that is producing the wrong answer”, says one associate.

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Christopher Harborne's early bet on crypto made him a fortune

Harborne, who is in his early 60s, was born in Britain but for more than two decades has lived and worked in Thailand where he has joint nationality and goes by the Thai name Chakrit Sakunkrit. “There’s a romantic side to him,” says one senior Reform member, who describes him as “a merchant adventurer with a great belief in this country”.

But others have questioned the transparency of an international business empire – which now includes a major shareholding in Tether, the biggest stablecoin, and its sister crypto exchange Bitfinex, as well as a sizeable chunk of the UK defence group QinetiQ. Harborne holds some assets in his English name, and others in that of his Thai alter ego.

Last year, he and his aviation fuel company AML Global won a defamation case against The Wall Street Journal for making “false accusations of fraud, money laundering and financing terrorism” in a 2023 article examining companies connected to Tether, says CoinDesk. The judgment noted that “when he became a naturalised Thai citizen, he was required to adopt a Thai name” for legal purposes.

Harborne worked as a consultant with McKinsey in the late 1980s before taking management positions at firms including Walkers and PepsiCo, notes The New Statesman. In 2003, Harborne registered AML Global in Thailand, later forming the Sherriff Global Group, which, among other things, trades private planes. AML would go on to win substantial contracts with the US government. But it was Harborne’s “early bet on cryptocurrencies” that really sealed his fortune, says the FT. He was in at the start of ethereum when it launched in 2014 at about $0.30 per token; that price has now mushroomed to roughly $3,300.

Harborne has his detractors in the Reform movement. Ben Habib – the breakaway founder of the hard-right Advance UK party – was incensed when Harborne gave the Conservative party £1.5 million in 2022 and donated £1 million to Boris Johnson’s private office after he stood down as Tory leader. “I think it’s rotten, Harborne is on every side of the trade.” Still, thanks to his longtime “silent donor”, Farage now has cash in the bag with which to fight the local elections next April, says The Times. “It’s his teenage self he has to beat.”

This article was first published in MoneyWeek's magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.

Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.