Nearly three-quarters of registered donations to Reform UK come from wealthy people or companies linked to tax havens, the Mirror can reveal.
The political party that poses as being the most patriotic has received £16.5million since 2019 from a string of donors with offshore business interests. Some of them don’t even live in the UK, choosing instead to base themselves in locations like Monaco or Thailand, our investigation with the Good Law Project shows.
Michael Evans
Michael Evans, 88, is a retired real estate magnate who lives in Monaco with his wife Helga. She is now the “person of significant control” of Evans Management Limited, which gave £200,000 to Reform UK last year. In 2017, Mr Evans told Super Yacht Life about his custom-built 65m yacht White Rose of Drachs, which they spend three months aboard with their family cruising the Mediterranean every year: “We have lots of toys, which are a big hit.”
Christopher Harborne
Ex-pat tycoon Christopher Harborne, 61, reportedly has joint British and Thai nationality and goes by the name Chakrit Sakunkrit in the South-East Asian country. His donations to the Brexit Party, now known as Reform, stopped in 2020 and he has since donated £1.5m to the Tories, as well as backing former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office. The multimillionaire made money from an aviation fuel company and a number of major crypto-currency investments.
Jeremy Hosking
City of London financier Jeremy Hosking, 66, is a former Tory backer who has since donated millions to Reform. He said earlier this year this was “in support of their embrace of the cultural crisis in Britain. I feel sure lots of Tory sympathisers are feeling the same way.” He has also been bankrolling Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party, which endorsed Reform in the General Election, while offering £5,000 to Tory candidates who signed up to a“four-point commitment to culture”, including leaving the European Court of Human Rights. The four Tories who did so all lost their seats.
Margaret Hepburn
Brit Margaret Hepburn, 72, has lived in Monaco for nearly three decades and talked about how it has been “changed for the better” by Prince Albert. She describes herself as a “lifetime entrepreneur with passion and commitment to working in harmony with nature” and launched Hepburn Bio Care in 2006. The company funded Reform UK in the election and Mrs Hepburn has said she is “somewhat worried by today’s young people’s lack of self-discipline and feeling of entitlement”.