Most donations to Farage’s Reform UK come from rich or corporations in tax havens

Nearly three quarters of registered donations to Reform UK come from wealthy people or companies linked to tax havens, The Mirror can reveal.

The party that claims to be the most patriotic has received £16.5m since 2019 from donors with offshore business interests. Some do not even live in the UK, our investigation with the Good Law Project shows. It comes after we revealed both Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and his deputy Richard Tice set up offshore trusts.

A Lib Dem spokesman said: “For a party that is so keen to cut Britain off from the rest of the world, Reform certainly seems happy to take in millions of pounds from donors linked to foreign tax havens.”

Overseas-based Reform UK donors include the Evans family who gave £200,000 last year through Evans Management Limited. This firm is owned through a Jersey-based parent company and has been controlled since 2016 by property tycoon Michael Evans and wife Helga who, according to Companies House, are resident in tax haven Monaco – where they base their 213ft superyacht.

Another donor listed as living in Monaco is Margaret Hepburn, owner of Hepburn Bio Care, which gave £24,000 last year.

Reform UK’s biggest donor is financier Christopher Harborne, who lives in Thailand and has given £13.7m since 2019. He was named in court documents as the owner of a British Virgin Islands company.

Jeremy Hosking has given £2,468,000 to Reform UK since 2019. He is one of three controlling shareholders in Marathon Asset Management, owned via a parent company in Jersey, MAM Investments.

None of the donors responded to a request for comment.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing or that any have avoided paying tax. But our probe raises questions about Reform’s reliance on money from sources linked to tax havens. Other donors include firms owned via Jersey and the Isle of Man.

Their combined donations of £16.5m form about 75% of the £22.5m Reform has registered with the Electoral Commission since 2019, including a period when it was the Brexit Party.

When we approached Mr Farage, he sent us a link to a report about Labour accepting a £4m donation from hedge fund Quadrature Capital, which is owned by a company in the Caymans. But he declined to be interviewed. Instead, a Reform UK spokesman said all its donations comply with rules and are regularly declared.

Quadrature said it has paid more than £2bn in corporation tax to date. A Labour source said: “Reform is the dodgiest outfit UK politics has seen in some time.”

In 2013, we revealed Mr Farage set up an offshore trust in the Isle of Man, but he said it had been a mistake and he had never used it.

Last month, we revealed Mr Tice put millions of pounds of shares in his property empire in an offshore trust in Jersey three decades ago before moving it to the UK five years ago.

His family firm has also donated £126,000 to the Conservative Party, £91,000 of which was before 2006, we can reveal. Mr Tice told the Mirror that Sunley Holdings Ltd, set up by his uncle, has been run by his cousins for 15 years.