Nigel Farage’s party has received another £4m from a British crypto billionaire pardoned by Donald Trump.
The donation brings the total given by Ben Delo, who previously announced he was moving back to Britain to help "build a war chest" for Reform to fight the next election, to £8m.
The businessman was convicted in the US four years ago over failings in an anti-money laundering programme in his business, before being pardoned by the US president.
Reform believes Mr Delo, who was formerly based in Hong Kong, will not be caught by the new overseas donor cap.
According to new figures on donations released by the Electoral Commission, the party did not get any money in the second quarter of the year from the Thailand-based crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who has given £15m to the party since the general election, as well as a £5m “gift” to Mr Farage before that.
That £5m is now at the centre of a probe by parliament’s standards watchdog, which is investigating whether it should have been declared.
Mr Farage insists he did not need to declare it. He triggered a by-election last month in a bid to, as he put it, let the voters in his constituency decide the issue. However, if the findings go against him, he could still face another by-election and potentially be rejected from Parliament.
Reform’s total of £5.3m in donations swamps other parties. Labour received £3.5m, the Conservatives £2.8m and the Liberal Democrats £1.3m.
Labour received £650,000 from Autoglass founder Gary Lubner and supermarket tycoon Lord Sainsbury, while the entrepreneur Ali Mosawi donated £550,000.
The donor cap, applied since March, states that donors must be on the UK domestic electoral register for at least 12 months, or else they cannot give more than £100,000 a year.
In April, in a piece for The Telegraph, Mr Delo said England was his home and “the biggest obstacle to national recovery is the entrenched self-deception of our elites”.
“Their regime of nonsense now poses such a grave threat to the UK that, for the first time in my life, I’ve become politically active,” he added. “Since the start of this year, I have donated £4m to help Nigel Farage to build Reform UK into a genuine alternative party of government... For the first time, I feel that serious people are looking honestly at what it might take to fix Britain.”
He said that, as an autistic person, he did not like that “the official culture of government now forces everyone to be chronically dishonest”.
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