Nigel Farage-backed bitcoin business buys gold firm which employs Nigel Farage

The Reform leader, who by that point had already trousered more than £1 million in outside earnings since finally being elected as MP for Clacton, said he was delighted to “become an investor in Stack” and “lend my support to the team”.

In April the man convinced he is to be Britain’s next prime minister bought a whopping £2 million of bitcoin for Stack.

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“We are about to place our bitcoin order,” said the Reform leader in a promotional video set to music better suited to an eSports tournament. “Stack cannot be a bitcoin treasury unless we…” Step forward new tech bro Kwarteng to finish his sentence with a cheering “…buy bitcoin!”

Kwarteng, who stepped down as an MP in 2024, became executive chair of Stack in October last year. He and his wife together own 5.4% of the company. Farage’s stake currently stands at 6.3%. The company’s biggest investor is Paul Withers, who is also the co-founder of the precious metals trader Direct Bullion.

In a happy coincidence, in July Farage declared another £270,000 for just 12 hours’ work as a “brand ambassador” for Direct Bullion – or £22,500 an hour (the website Payscale estimates the average annual salary in Clacton to be £25,000). It took his total earnings from the firm to just shy of half a million pounds since becoming an MP in 2024.

Now it has emerged Stack is seeking to buy Direct Bullion. Its proposed acquisition, reported in a regulatory announcement by the Aquis-listed firm, would consist of £3 million in cash, £4 million in new stack shares “locked in for years” and “up to £5 million more paid only if the business hits profits targets in future years”. It is Stack’s first investment.

Farage’s “brand ambassadorship” – which seems to consist of social media videos and stands at Reform conferences – has certainly been good for business at Direct Bullion. The London-based gold dealer notched up a profit after tax of £2.15 million on £52.1 million in turnover in the most recent full financial year – “growing revenue 288 per cent over three years, with growth recognised in the Financial Times’ FT 1000 fastest-growing companies in Europe”, according to the deal announcement.

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“This is the strategy we have written about all summer, executed,” reads the announcement by Stack. “Stack was built as a dual-engine company: cash-generative businesses alongside a Bitcoin treasury, so the company is never dependent on capital markets alone and never forced to sell Bitcoin to pay its bills.”

As Rats in a Sack has noted before, it is impressive Farage understands all of this complex tech jargon, given that in January he defended the fact he breached MPs’ rules 17 times by failing to register his financial interests within the time limit by claiming that he doesn’t “do computers”.

The parliamentary commissioner for standards ruled that Farage failed to register a whopping £384,000 within the 28-day limit, including payments for his presenting stints on GB News, speaking engagements with Google and money earned through the Cameo message service.

Blaming someone else as ever – Farage said he had been “extremely let down by a very senior member of staff”. “You may say, why don’t I enter those things myself. Well I don’t do computers… so I rely on other people to do those things for me. I’m not, I’m afraid, computer literate, which makes me yet more an oddball than perhaps I was before.”

What a quick learner he must be!