anti-climate

Nigel Farage Has Personally Accepted £675,000 from Foreign Sources

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Article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog

President Donald Trump and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at CPAC in 2018. Credit: Shealah Craighead / White House (Public domain)

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has accepted more than half a million pounds from foreign companies, governments, and donors while serving as an MP, DeSmog can reveal.

Since July 2024, when he was elected as the Member of Parliament for Clacton, Farage has received almost £2 million in income and gifts, with £675,000 coming from foreign sources. Of Farage’s 28 benefactors, 20 are based abroad (71 percent).

This comes amid growing scrutiny of the foreign influences on British democracy following attempts by the Labour government to clamp down on overseas donations to UK political parties.

Farage’s largest foreign income stream has been Cameo – the U.S. platform where celebrities record videos for money – earning £222,000 on the site since being elected to Parliament. Farage has now deleted his profile on the platform after a Guardian investigation found he had sold Cameo videos repeating extremist slogans and endorsing a neo-Nazi event.

This income has been received on top of Farage’s £94,000 a year public salary.

Labour’s chair Anna Turley said: “Nigel Farage rarely turns up to do his actual job. Yet he finds time to jet off around the world on his donor’s private plane and trouser half a million quid while families struggle. Reform are not on your side. They’re just in it for themselves.”

A version of this article was published by The Mirror.

The Reform leader has also been paid for a range of foreign speaking events, including £40,000 to address Nomad Capitalist Live in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in September 2024. Nomad Capitalist, which is based in Hong Kong, advises the super rich on how to cut their tax bills.

Farage has also received gifts from foreign governments. As revealed by DeSmog, the Abu Dhabi government provided tickets and hospitality worth £10,000 for Farage to attend the local Formula One Grand Prix in December.

“At a time when trust in politics is at rock bottom, the public deserves absolute confidence that their MPs are working solely in service of their constituents and their country, not dancing to the tune of foreign interests,” said Kamila Kingstone, senior campaign lead at Spotlight on Corruption.

“Cases like this make it painfully clear that transparency alone is not enough and that the current system leaves far too much room for foreign influence. The government urgently needs to impose tougher limits on MPs’ second jobs and on the gifts and payments they are allowed to accept, so that public service cannot be overshadowed by private gain.”

Despite claiming to represent working-class voters, Farage – the UK’s highest-paid MP – has also received private jet trips worth £85,000 from major Reform donor Christopher Harborne. A billionaire cryptocurrency investor, Harborne is based in Thailand, where he has lived for over 20 years.

Farage is a major backer of cryptocurrencies, and has £215,000 invested in a UK Bitcoin treasury, Stack BTC – owned by Paul Withers, who runs the gold exchange Direct Bullion, which has paid Farage more than £500,000 since he became an MP. Farage’s Stack BTC shares have reportedly doubled in value since he bought them, largely due to the fanfare around his investment.

Harborne is Reform’s biggest donor, having given £12 million to the party last year and more than £22 million since 2019. However, his contributions to the party are now in jeopardy after Labour introduced new rules that cap donations from overseas residents to £100,000 a year.

Earlier this month, crypto entrepreneur and right-wing philanthropist Ben Delo said he had given £4 million to Reform and would be moving back to the UK in order to circumvent the government’s new donation rules.

“Farage is bought and paid for by vested interests,” Green Party deputy leader Rachel Millward said. “Clearly, his disdain for foreign people does not extend to those who want to give him money to advance his hateful agenda. He loves open borders when it comes to cash!”

Reform UK is the UK’s leading anti-climate party, with several of its senior figures – including Farage – denying basic climate science. The Reform leader has claimed it’s “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant, while his deputy Richard Tice has called it “plant food”.

Of the £1.3 million earned by Farage from UK sources, a number are closely connected to overseas interests. GB News, Farage’s largest single source of income, is co-owned by the Legatum Group – a Dubai-based investment vehicle – and hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, whose firm is 40 percent owned by U.S. private equity giant KKR.

Reform and Farage were approached for comment.

Foreign Influences on Farage

Reform has close connections to a number of foreign regimes and influential overseas interests.

Farage is one of U.S. President Donald Trump’s most vocal European allies, having repeatedly campaigned for his election – including in 2016, when Farage was the first foreign politician to be given an audience with Trump following his presidential victory.

Farage is also well connected in Trump’s MAGA movement.

“He’s seen as the elder statesman. He almost has senator status. If England were the 51st state, Nigel Farage would be one of the senators,” one of his longstanding friends, Raheem Kassam, told the New Statesman in December.

As documented by DeSmog, Farage has been helping the Heartland Institute – an influential pro-Trump climate science denial group – to extend its influence in the UK and Europe.

The Heartland Institute was one of the groups behind Project 2025 – the authoritarian blueprint for Trump’s second term, convened by the Heritage Foundation.

According to The Spectator, key people from Project 2025 “have been shuttling between London and Washington” to give their advice to Farage.

And the Reform leader has earned thousands from MAGA events since he became an MP.

In the past year, Farage has been paid more than £11,000 to speak at Hillsdale College – a conservative university in Michigan – and nearly £28,000 to speak at the ‘Club for Growth’, a lobby group that has endorsed and campaigned for Trump.

Farage has also racked up donor-funded flights worth at least £150,000 to speak at pro-Trump events since he was elected to Parliament, and has received £47,000 from Trump-donating U.S. tech giants X Corp, Google, and Meta.

But Trump’s America is not the only foreign regime with financial ties to Farage and his party.

In addition to the F1 hospitality given to Farage by the Abu Dhabi government in December, other senior figures in Reform are in business with the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, December 2025.

Credit: Nigel Farage / X

In October 2024, the party’s treasurer Nick Candy entered into a “strategic joint venture partnership” with Modon Holding – a real estate company owned by the Abu Dhabi government – via his firm Candy Capital. He has also partnered with the state-owned Dubai World Trade Centre to develop “super-prime” properties on the site. 

Meanwhile, Reform’s Nadhim Zahawi – a former Tory minister who defected to Farage’s party in January – is a senior figure at Omniyat, a luxury property developer in Dubai. Farage convened a group of prospective patrons in Dubai earlier this year in an attempt to convince them to donate to the party.

As a result, campaigners are urging the government to close the political finance loopholes that allow foreign regimes and big money interests to shape UK policy.

“An MP’s only real job should be representing their constituents,” said Tom Brake, director of the campaign group Unlock Democracy. “Yet sadly, for some MPs, supplementing their own income appears to have greater appeal.

“This is bad enough, but what is even more concerning is when MPs receive income from foreign sources, particularly foreign governments or organisations closely aligned with them. These financial relationships always risk giving undue influence and leverage to foreign entities, which UK legislators should avoid at all costs.”

In March, the Rycroft Review was released, a government report from former Foreign Office permanent secretary Philip Rycroft, which summarised the threats to British democracy from overseas actors.

“This country faces a persistent problem of foreign interests seeking to exert influence on, and to interfere in, our politics,” Rycroft said. “Too much of this is malign and seeks to sow distrust and exacerbate divisions in UK society, with the ultimate aim of undermining confidence in our democracy… If government does not act swiftly to gear up to counter these threats, there is a real risk they will run away from us.”

Article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog

Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Climate science denier Nigel Farage explains that it's simple to blame asylum-seekers or Muslims for everything.
Climate science denier Nigel Farage explains that it’s simple to blame asylum-seekers or Muslims for everything.
Nigel Farage reminds you that he's the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.

Who Funds Nigel Farage? Mapping His Millions

Continue ReadingNigel Farage Has Personally Accepted £675,000 from Foreign Sources

How MAGA Lobbying is Undermining EU Climate Rules

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Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog

Series: MAGA

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, U.S. President Donald Trump, and French President Emmanuel Macron. DeSmog collage. Credit: Faces of the World / Flickr (Macron), Steffen Prößdorf (Merz), Gage Skidmore / Flickr (Trump)

European leaders are bending to the demands of U.S. climate science deniers.

“The CSDDD is the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union,” the Heartland Institute, a pro-Trump U.S. think tank, tweeted on 31 March.

The Heartland Institute is one of the world’s leading climate science denial groups. It has helped to draft Donald Trump’s anti-climate policies, which have seen the president pledge to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels and once again pull the U.S. out of the flagship 2015 Paris Agreement.

Over recent months – along with a host of other Trump allies – the Heartland Institute has set its sights on a new target: the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

This vague acronym belies the potentially transformative impact of the new law. In its original form, the CSDDD sought to require large companies – and those in “high risk” sectors – trading in the EU to address human rights and environmental issues in their own operations and in their supply chains. High turnover companies would also have been forced to adopt a plan to align with the Paris Agreement, including setting emissions reduction targets.

The Heartland Institute and its anti-climate, anti-regulation peers are vocal opponents of the law – and launched an aggressive campaign to water it down, or even to see it scrapped entirely.

These groups, which are all part of the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) ecosystem, view the CSDDD as symbolic of the way in which “woke” governments are attempting to force citizens and global corporations to conform to a pro-diversity, pro-environment agenda.

Following Trump’s election in November, these MAGA groups wasted no time in formulating their plans to oppose this perceived agenda.

They focused in particular on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which attempt to create workplaces free from bias – and environmental, social and governance (ESG) schemes, which try to ensure that organisations are guided by responsible and sustainable practices, not just profit.

In December, barely a month after Trump’s victory, the Heritage Foundation – the group that wrote the key ‘Project 2025’ blueprint for the president’s second term – published a report entitled: “ESG, DEI, and What to Do About Them”.

In the report, the Heritage Foundation described ESG and DEI as “pernicious”, and called the CSDDD “a serious problem”.

Two months later, the State Financial Officers Foundation – an influential network of Republican finance officials – wrote an open letter calling on the new administration to “investigate” the CSDDD, claiming that the EU’s directives are based on “unscientific assumptions about the nature of climate change impacts” and “will force companies to incriminate themselves”.

This quickly filtered through to Trump’s Cabinet. On 12 February, Howard Lutnick, the president’s pick for commerce secretary, told a Senate committee that the CSDDD threatened to place “significant burdens” on U.S. companies, and that the Trump administration was exploring the use of “commercial tools” to mount a counter-attack against the EU’s environmental regulations.

Soon this rhetoric made its way to the White House. In March, as part of the worldwide tariffs implemented by the Trump administration, the president called the EU “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the world”.

But the EU hasn’t stood firm in the face of Trump’s war of words.

The EU has already announced that it will be scaling back the CSDDD and delaying its implementation. The number of companies within scope has been reduced by 80 percent. The firms in question will only be required to file due diligence reports every five years, and won’t be required to investigate the ESG operations of their indirect business partners. The implementation of the law has also been postponed until 2028.

But Trump’s MAGA hardliners are still not satisfied. In April, the Heartland Institute released an open letter signed by 31 other groups, calling for Congress and the Trump administration to “take immediate steps to counter the CSDDD’s implementation”, including “if necessary, imposing retaliatory trade policies that punish EU nations for eroding America’s sovereignty, freedoms, and prosperity.”

This backlash is now influencing European leaders. In late May, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for the CSDDD to be scrapped entirely. They claim it must be abandoned in order to defend the “competitiveness” of European corporations, with Macron stating that Europe must “synchronise with the U.S. and the rest of the world.”

This judgement signifies the appeasement of anti-climate pressure groups that are ideologically opposed to clean energy and climate science.

The Heartland Institute has denied that humans are driving climate change, which it has called a “delusion”, while the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document urged Trump to “dismantle the administrative state”, reverse policies on climate action, slash restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrap state investment in renewable energy, and gut the Environmental Protection Agency.

If the EU waters down its climate policies in response to Trump’s pressure, it will have helped to send Project 2025 global.

The ‘Climate Cartel’

It’s unclear whether these MAGA groups – and the Trump administration – will ease up on the EU if the CSDDD is ditched entirely. They may simply use it as evidence that European lawmakers will buckle under enough pressure.

Indeed, MAGA’s opposition to the CSDDD is part of a multi-pronged campaign that seeks to dismantle global climate initiatives pioneered by both governments and corporations.

Much of the original groundwork for this campaign was undertaken by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and its chair Jim Jordan, a leading Trump supporter.

Last year, Jordan’s committee produced reports – and demanded evidence from major corporations – on a supposed “climate cartel” of “left-wing activists and major financial institutions”.

The committee alleged that some of the world’s biggest asset managers – that have questionable climate commitments – are conspiring to force American companies to decarbonise against their wishes.

BlackRock’s New York office. Credit: Anthony Quintano / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

As part of its “investigation”, the committee demanded information from more than 130 U.S.-based companies, retirement and pension programmes, as well as 60 U.S.-based asset managers.

In November, 11 Republican-led states sued BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street – three of the world’s biggest asset managers – over their ESG policies. In West Virginia and Oklahoma, nearly two dozen banks have been barred from public contracts for trying to divest from fossil fuels.

These actions, along with the anti-climate rhetoric of Donald Trump, have had a chilling effect. In February last year, BlackRock, State Street, and JP Morgan Asset Management withdrew from Climate Action 100+, an investor-led initiative that works to ensure the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters take action on climate change.

Fast forward a year, and a growing list of major U.S. corporations are either cancelling or delaying their sustainability reports – designed to show how they are meeting their climate commitments.

And a new story from the investigative outlet CORRECTIV today reports that German insurance giants and investment firms are withdrawing from climate agreements, while companies are quietly shelving their sustainability policies, amid the anti-ESG backlash orchestrated by Trump and his acolytes.

As one sustainability expert at a financial firm told CORRECTIV: “We have to be careful not to harm the cause by sticking our necks out and becoming a target in the U.S.”

This article was produced with support from the European Media and Information Fund, managed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The sole responsibility for any content supported by the European Media and Information Fund lies with the author(s) and it may not necessarily reflect the positions of the EMIF and the Fund Partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute.

Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog

Continue ReadingHow MAGA Lobbying is Undermining EU Climate Rules