The biggest donor toReform UKhas been revealed as the mother of the party’s unpaid aide and former fraudster George Cottrell.
Fiona Cottrell, an aristocratic former girlfriend of King Charles in the 1970s, donated £250,000 in March, taking her total contributions up to £750,000 over the past year.
The latest figures from the Electoral Commission show Reform failing to raise as much money as the Conservatives, despite its claims to be capturing its rival party’s donors. The Tories raised £3.3m, Labour £2.3m, and Reform and theLiberal Democratsabout £1.5m each, excluding public funds.
However, the donations to Reform show that the party is attracting a wider breadth of donors than before Nigel Farage returned as leader, when it was largely kept afloat by loans from its then leader and now deputy,Richard Tice.
Fiona Cottrell started giving money for the first time last year. Her son, George, is regularly at Farage’s side, including at a party fundraiser earlier this year, on the election campaign trail and at the event to announce Reform’s new chair on Tuesday. His role in the party has been described as an unpaid volunteer but he has also paid for trips by Farage to the US and Brussels.
George Cottrell, a former head of fundraising for Ukip, spent eight months in prison in the US in 2016-17 after being accused of offering money-laundering services on the dark web in 2014 – before he worked in politics. He served time for a single count of wire fraud after 20 other charges were dropped as part of a plea deal.
His business interests are largely in Montenegro,where he reportedly lost €20m (£16m) in a single poker game. He recently launched a polling and campaigns company in the UK called Geostrategy International.
The other big donor to the party over the last quarter was a company called Tisun Investments, controlled by Tice. The company has given £613,000 since the beginning of the year in 33 tranches.
Nick Candy, Reform’s treasurer, had pledged to give about £1,000,000 but his donation was not in official filings published by the Electoral Commission on Tuesday. Farage said at a press conference earlier in the day that Candy had given £313,000, and that the party was “extremely grateful” and looking forward to the remaining amount due in the next few months.
Two former Conservative donors, Bassim Haidar and Mohamed Amersi, gave £25,000 each to attend Reform’s fundraising event at Oswald’s Club in Mayfair in January.
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TheConservativesraised a much larger sum of £3.3m during the quarter – excluding public funds, which took it above £5m. They received a £1m donation from Jeremy Elliott San, a video games tycoon. The party also received big chunks of cash from longstanding donors, including £250,000 from Flowidea, owned by the Swiss-born banker Sir Henry Angest, and £200,000 from Christopher Rea.
It also accepted £50,000 from Neil Record, a businessman who chairs the climate denier lobby group Net Zero Watch, and who hosted the Conservative party leader, Kemi Badenoch, for a £14,000 week-long “residential” with her family and political colleagues earlier this year.
David Ross, a co-founder of Carphone Warehouse who once funded a holiday in Mustique for Boris Johnson, returned to the party as a big donor for the first time since 2022. He will take up a senior treasurer role in the autumn.
Labour raised most of its money from trade unions, including Unite, Unison and GMB, but it was also left £350,000 as a bequest by Reginald Collins, aLabourmember.
Farage’s political entity previously received much larger sums of money when it was the Brexit party, including about £10m to cover its 2019 election costs from the crypto and aviation fuel investor Christopher Harborne.
Another company controlled by Tice, Britain Means Business, gave £500,000 to Reform before the 2024 election but this company was originally a cross-party campaign to support Brexit.
In the months before the election, Reform also received £200,000 from thebusinessman Zia Yusuf, who became the party’s new chair last year before resigning last week, and then returning two days later in a lesser role.