A major cryptocurrency company has announced that Nigel Farage has made a £2m purchase of bitcoin in a strengthening of ties with the sector.
The Reform UK leader was filmed in a promotional video for Stack BTC, a crypto reserve business chaired by Liz Truss’s former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.
The company said the purchase was a “landmark moment” in British politics. It claimed Mr Farage was the first sitting MP and first UK political party leader to publicly buy bitcoin. He had already invested £215,000 in Stack in March.
Mr Farage and Reform have pledged to liberalise the bitcoin market and have taken millions of pounds in donations from crypto billionaires, including Thailand-based Christopher Harborne and Hong Kong-based Ben Delo.
The government has moved to ban crypto donations to political parties and asked the Electoral Commission to investigate potential crypto donations that Mr Farage claims Reform has received but has not yet declared.
Stack, a London-based firm listed on the UK challenger stock exchange Aquis, operates by building a portfolio of companies and channelling their surplus cash into bitcoin. Its core objective is to establish a substantial bitcoin treasury through continuous accumulation of the digital currency.
Labour questioned why Mr Farage was investing his money with Mr Kwarteng, who became executive chair of Stack last October.
The party chair, Anna Turley, said: “Nigel Farage is hyping up a former Tory chancellor who crashed the economy in a bid to line his own pockets. From Farage’s crypto-boosting to his deputy Richard Tice’s admission that his business didn’t pay the taxes it owed, Reform are more interested in themselves than in standing up for working people. While Labour is working to clear up the mess the Tories left, Nigel Farage is cosying up to the architect of Liz Truss’s catastrophic mini-budget. It tells you everything you need to know about whose side he’s on.”
Mr Farage also defended his deputy, Richard Tice, for the first time over allegations he had failed to properly pay tax on dividends.
Mr Tice, who is the party’s business spokesperson and jointly owns it with Mr Farage, has been accused of failing to pay tens of thousands of pounds in tax on dividends that were paid to him and his offshore trust. Allegations in The Sunday Times suggested he received “at least £91,000 in excess payments” as a result of the failure.
Among the critics was the tax expert Dan Neidle, who claimed that Mr Tice’s company “broke the law”. But Mr Farage dismissed Mr Neidle as “a Labour activist” and suggested that Mr Tice had in fact “most likely paid more tax than had his company paid corporation tax.”
He insisted the area of taxation was “extremely complicated” but said there was no suggestion Mr Tice had avoided tax. He said: “If our biggest critic says that Richard Tice has not evaded or avoided tax, has paid the full amount, and actually maybe even a little bit more, think about it, then I’m satisfied with that.”
At a press conference, Mr Farage and his home affairs spokesman announced plans for an inquiry into the so-called “Boriswave” of immigration between 2020 and 2024, even though two of the prime movers of that period – the former home secretary Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, a former immigration minister – have since defected to Reform.
He claimed that the costs of a generation of non-EU migrants who came to Britain in the years after 2021 would be an “economic millstone” for the country.
Mr Farage said: “There is still time. There is still something we can do about this Boriswave. But if over a couple of million people get indefinite leave to remain over the course of the next 18 months, we will be putting around our necks an economic millstone that, frankly, will be catastrophic.”
He later defended former Conservatives who served in Mr Johnson’s government and have since defected to Reform UK.
Mr Farage said: “Of course, there are some that will say, ‘Ah, but you’ve got Suella Braverman, you’ve got Robert Jenrick in your party’. Yes, absolutely. And if you read what Suella has written on this, and you read what Robert has written on this, they tried from within to stop the disaster that really started properly in 2021, and that’s why they resigned or were fired.”
The Independent has asked Reform for comment on the cryptocurrency announcement.
