Christopher Harborne: Extraordinary wealth of billionaire Yorkshireman bankrolling Nigel Farage and Reform revealed

Christopher Harborne is a new entry on this year’s Sunday Times Rich List with an incredible £18.1 billion to his name - putting him sixth on the overall list and making him far and away the wealthiest person with a connection to the North.

To put that in context, the North’s second-placed Shepherd family have an estimated wealth of £1.35bn.

Now based in Thailand, Mr Harborne is reported to have donated more than £22m to Reform UK and its predecessor the Brexit Party while he separately made a personal £5m gift to Nigel Farage in 2024.

It was announced this week that Mr Farage is to face an investigation by the Parliamentary Commission for Standards over a failure to declare the latter sum.

He is reported to have received the money before he announced he would stand in Clacton at that year’s general election.

Parliamentary rules specify that new MPs should register financial interests received in the 12 months before their election within one month of entering Parliament.

Reform has described the money as a “personal, unconditional gift” and said no rules were broken. Mr Farage has also insisted there is no connection between the gift and the purchase of a £1.4m property he completed shortly after receiving Mr Harborne’s money.

Mr Farage said this week that it is a “disgrace” that Mr Harborne’s personal donation to him is in the public domain.

He told The Sun: “This was given to me on a completely unconditional basis but frankly it was given as a reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years.

“I can’t be bought by anybody. I have done nothing wrong in any way at all.”

The Guardian, which subsequently broke the original story of the £5m donation to Mr Farage, reported in April that Mr Harborne - who is described by his lawyers as an “intensely-private person” - was born in Mosborough in 1962.

Mark Vellacott, an aerospace businessman who was a friend of Mr Harborne’s late sister, told the newspaper that Mr Harborne’s father was an insurance investor while his mother was described as a resilient Yorkshirewoman from a well-off background.

Mr Harborne was described as gentle and extremely clever, with Mr Vellacott saying: “Chris does not like anything that’s going to control him.”

Gawain Towler, a former director of communications for Reform, told The Guardian that Mr Harborne took a desk in the Brexit Party’s campaign headquarters during the 2019 General Election campaign.

He said: “He believed in the basic premise that Britain should govern itself. I never heard him say, ‘And I want you to have this policy’. The Brexit party only had one policy, and that was to have Brexit.”

Mr Harborne reportedly went to Westminster School and onto Cambridge before starting a business career, moving to Thailand in the mid-1990s and going onto found an investment firm called Sherriff Global.

He subsequently founded a jet fuel broker called AML Global and grew his wealth further through cryptocurrency trading.

The Sunday Times Rich List said he has a 12 per cent holding in cryptocurrency firm Tether, which is estimated to be valued at £200 billion and issues digital cash known as stablecoins.

It said his easiest UK asset to track is a £357 million stake in defence technology company QinetiQ.

Robert Watts, compiler of the Sunday Times Rich List, said of Mr Harborne: “He’s not entirely self-made, he was born from quite a wealthy family.”

He said the reason that Mr Harborne is a new entry to the list is that in the past it has proved difficult to verify the extent of his wealth.

“He's lived in Thailand for 30 years and many of his companies are offshore,” he said.

“It's just been impossible for us to verify and put a decent fix on his financial wealth. But this year, new information has come our way.

“A big part of it is this huge crypto firm Tether. He’s got a 12 per cent stake in it. That accounts for by far the bulk of his work, but we've managed to piece together other new bits of information.”

He said that includes a payments firm in London worth £23m and a private jet company.

Mr Watts said his stake in QinetiQ alone qualifies him for inclusion on this year’s Rich List, which requires a minimum £340m.

He said there is limited public information about his upbringing in Yorkshire.

“There’s very little, he was privately educated and then went to Cambridge.”

But he added: “We are building up more of a picture of this intriguing Yorkshire-born individual from Sheffield. There are limited connections [to Yorkshire] that we can see, but we do count people on our regional lists if they were born. I don’t think it has been clocked by many people that he is from Yorkshire.”

Mr Watts said the £18bn valuation “excludes many of the businesses we do know he owns” because of a lack of publicly-available filings about the companies.

“It is possible he is significantly wealthier than we have been able to establish,” he said.

In September 2025, Mr Farage was asked on LBC radio about a forthcoming meeting with the Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey and said he intended to discuss Tether with him.

He said: “Tether is a stablecoin. Stablecoins are the way which money goes from conventional currencies through into cryptocurrencies and back again. Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company.”

He added: “Stablecoins, crypto, this world is enormous, and I’ve been urging for years that London should embrace it. We should become a global trading centre for this stuff.”

He said he intended to raise the issue of proposals to cap stablecoin ownership at a maximum £10,000 per person.

Mr Farage said: “Some of my friends have said, ‘Shall we just emigrate? Why is the Bank so out of touch? Why is it behaving like a dinosaur? Why not get with the 21st Century?’ These new technologies aren’t going away. They’re here.”

Earlier this year, Labour MP Phil Brickell raised concerns about Mr Harborne’s influence on British politics.

He told a Westminster Hall debate in Parliament in February that a £9m donation he had made to Reform UK - the largest single donation ever made to a British political party - “is not democratic participation; it is political domination”.

He said: “The National Crime Agency has explicitly warned that Tether has been used for sanctions evasion and money laundering, including in relation to organised crime and Russia-linked networks.

“That is not to say that Harborne himself is complicit in any wrongdoing, but the fact is that we now have a large political party bankrolled by an overseas billionaire whose wealth is tied to a cryptoasset that our own law enforcement agencies have flagged as a tool used in Russia-linked illicit finance.”.

He added of the £9m donation: “The terrifying reality is that, under current rules, someone with that scale of wealth could make such donations again and again until a general election is called and the regulated period begins. That is not a level playing field. It is a plutocratic arms race – one set against an outdated concept of long and short campaign periods that has long been left behind in the modern world of 24/7 campaigning.”

Lawyers for Mr Harborne told The Guardian that he has not influenced nor sought to influence any politician that supports cryptocurrencies or any other of his business interests.

His lawyers did not respond to request for comment from The Yorkshire Post.