NCA investigation Crypto backed by Farage donor 'fuels Russian war effort'

A cryptocurrency backed by one of Nigel Farage's biggest donors has been used to help Russia fight its war against Ukraine, British investigators say The National Crime Agency (NCA) has spent four years trying to crack a multibillion-dollar scheme that exchanges cash from drug and gun sales in the UK for crypto, digital tokens that are designed to hide their users' identities.

- Tom Burgis

The scheme has enabled "sanctions evasions and the highest levels of organised crime, including providing money-laundering services to the Russian state", the agency says. Of the $24m (£18.3m) in crypto that the NCA and its counterparts abroad have been able to seize, the "vast majority" was issued by Tether.

A private company headquartered in El Salvador, Tether has grown so popular that it declared profits of $13bn for 2024, one and a half times those of McDonald's. Tether's shares are reportedly owned by a small group, among them Christopher Harborne, one of the UK's biggest political donors. Harborne took a 12% stake around 2016, court papers say, although it is unclear what share of Tether's profits he has received.

In 2019-20, as the UK was leaving the EU, Harborne gave £10m to Nigel Farage's Brexit party, since renamed Reform UK. In January, Farage accepted £28,000 from Harborne to attend Donald Trump's inauguration as president - the month after the US placed sanctions on the Russian bosses of the laundering networks and warned they were using Tether.

Reform UK, the first British political party to accept donations in crypto, did not respond to a request for comment. Harborne's lawyers said that accusing an investor in Tether of complicity in crimes perpetrated by users of its tokens would be "akin to claiming the US Treasury is an accomplice in money laundering because it prints the US dollar".

While there is no suggestion that Harborne himself is implicated in the money-laundering scheme, some of his fortune appears to have come from a company whose cryptocurrency is in high demand from illicit networks such as the Russian ones unearthed by the NCA's Operation Destabilise.