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Profiting in plain sight, Farage could earn a fortune by talking up bitcoin company
The Observer
|April 19, 2026
The Reform leader is emulating Trump by promoting a crypto firm in which he owns shares, and conflict of interest rules can't stop him
Stack BTC was almost unheard of until a few weeks ago, when the small company announced that Nigel Farage had bought shares in it worth about £215,000. If Stack performs as well as its owners hope, that investment will hand him a profit of millions of pounds in as little as two years.
The company is what is known as a bitcoin treasury, set up to buy and hold bitcoin. It is part of a cryptocurrency industry whose profits, experience shows, tend to rise as regulation gets lighter. Farage is the UK’s most prominent advocate of lighter crypto regulation.
Today, Farage owns about 5.5% of Stack. He can boost the company and talk up its share price, as he did in a video last week. He can tell the crypto industry, “I am your champion”, and describe the UK’s legislation of crypto as “ludicrous” - as he did, to applause, at a cryptocurrency conference in London in October - and as long as he says those words outside the House of Commons, he will not be in breach of parliamentary standards. He can potentially make himself a small fortune, trading on his position in public life, without breaking any laws.
There is no guaranteed payday for Farage. A startup like Stack needs luck as well as judgment to succeed. It could easily fail but even if that happens, Farage’s critics believe he has already overturned decades of established thinking about conflicts of interest. He has been accused of importing into the UK one of the ideas that have made Donald Trump and his associates rich while he has been president that as long as you do something in plain sight you can convince the world there is nothing wrong with it. He may be the first British politician to profit financially from the power and status of the office of prime minister before he has even occupied it.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 19, 2026-Ausgabe von The Observer.
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