A senior Reform UK official raised questions about whether major donations from billionaire backers Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo would be legal under the proposed new foreign donors cap three months before they gave £72m to the party.
James Orr, who was then Reform UK’s head of policy and a Cambridge professor, discussed potential difficulties around future donations from Harborne and Delo in undercover footage captured by the investigative reporting group Verbatim.
A reporter was posing as a potential donor when Orr talked to him about “filling the war chest in anticipation” of tougher donations rules, describing it as the establishment trying to “kneecap” the party.
Orr was suspended as Reform’s head of policy last month after Channel 4 broadcast some of Verbatim’s undercover filming in which he appeared to discuss ways to get around funding laws to allow donations from a US-based donor.
The matter is under police investigation and he remains suspended, although Reform has released its own report clearing Orr and another official of wrongdoing.
The new footage has been shared with the Guardian after a public debate about whether the two £36m donations from Harborne and Delo to Reform UK will be allowed under the cap. The party maintains the donations are legal, pointing out that the retrospective overseas donor cap has not yet been passed into law.
In the footage, recorded in July this year, Orr expressed doubt about whether Delo and Harborne would still be able to donate given, when it does become law, the £100,000 overseas donor cap is to cover party donations dating back to March this year.
Orr believed Delo would probably meet the residency test as long as he was not required to have been a tax resident, in which case he would be “stuffed”. He said Harborne was “probably more of a challenge” in terms of avoiding the overseas cap and he “can’t do anything for 12 months” after moving back.
Harborne had been living in Thailand until he registered to vote in Hampshire this summer, and Delo has long been resident in Hong Kong, though he has been on the UK domestic register for some years.
The new law will put a £100,000 limit on how much overseas donors can give to a political party. It will apply to donations made after March 2026, and will require any domestic donor who wants to give more than £100,000 to have been resident in the UK for at least a calendar year.
In the discussion, Orr was recorded as saying the party was too reliant on Harborne and Delo as “two big whales”. He said the new law was “a retrospective law, which is unheard of. So, we’re going to challenge it in the courts.”
Orr added: “We’ll push it through judicial review. And then … so, we’ll have a big fight. But, yeah, the last few days we’ve been working hard on just filling the war chest as best we can, in anticipation of something quite brutal.”
On whether the two men would be caught by the overseas cap, he said: “I mean, there’s going to be a huge fight over that. But Ben, I think it’s probably OK, because I think he is … it depends on how they legislate it, they might just say, you must have been tax domiciled here for X period of time, in which case Ben is stuffed.”
Orr went on to say: “It depends what … test for moving back you apply. So, under the common law, there’s a two-limb test, which is actually quite a – not a stringent one. It’s a factual thing, a factual matrix test.
“How much time you spend in England, do you have a house here, can you vote, do you have any bills that you pay, you know, it’s quite kind of, it’s not tax … So, on that test, Ben meets it, I think. And then the second then is intention. Do you intend to stay, so, evidence that you intend to stay …”
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Having debated whether Delo would meet the test, Orr said Harborne was “probably more of a challenge”. The Reform official said he would move back to the UK. “But, if he does move back, there’s 12 – he can’t pay – he can’t do anything for 12 months. And, it looks as if they will bring that in.”
In his chat with the undercover reporter, Orr also referred to the “complicated backstory” of Delo, a British-born billionaire who was convicted in the US in 2022 for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls in his cryptocurrency business. He was later pardoned by Donald Trump.
Orr also spoke about having spent time on Delo’s yacht in the Peloponnese this summer, talking of mixing work and a holiday in Greece, saying: “We went from Athens down to Ben’s boat in Porto Cheli.”
A Reform UK spokesperson said: “We are 100% confident both [donations] are legal and won’t ever have to be handed back.”
Orr did not respond to a request for comment. He has previously denied wrongdoing in relation to electoral laws on overseas funding and dismissed Verbatim as “politically motivated actors trying to discredit a political opponent through dubious legal means”.
Lawyers for Harborne described Orr’s comments as private speculation which it would not be appropriate to comment on and did not represent established facts. Delo’s lawyers did not respond substantively, saying he would not be drawn into speculation about a conversation he was not party to, or the legal effect of a law yet to be passed.
Reform has previously said it intends to take legal action against Verbatim and its directors over the undercover filming.
