Last week Rats in a Sack reported on Ben Delo, a billionaire crypto entrepreneur who is returning to the UK to give millions to Reform, and how he once paid a $10 million penalty after pleading guilty to a financial crime in the US.
The Daily Telegraph gave over two pages to the news that Delo, a little-known businessman, was returning from Hong Kong to bankroll Nigel Farage’s Turquoise Tories after Labour brought in a new law limiting political donations above £100,000 to those resident in the UK.
Delo accused Keir Starmer of using legislation specifically to target Reform donors “to stack the political deck against the most popular opposition party”, saying he planned to “build a war chest” for Farage’s mob.
What he devoted considerably less attention to, though, was the fact that he is a convicted criminal, having pleaded guilty in New York in 2022 to violating the US’s Bank Secrecy Act by “willfully failing to establish, implement and maintain” an anti-money laundering programme at BitMEX, the cryptocurrency derivatives trading platform he founded in 2014.
Delo and his co-founders had to pay a $10 million penalty and Delo was sentenced to 30 months’ probation, although was later pardoned along with two other BitMex founders by Donald Trump. Delo briefly mentioned this in his Telegraph article, but sniffily dismissed it as it “isn’t even a crime in the UK”.
But others have mentioned it, including a Substacker called James Wilson. And now he’s had a legal letter for his troubles, with Delo’s solicitors Addleshaw Goddard LLP claiming, among other things, that it is unlawful to publish information about Delo’s conviction.
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Citing Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, m’learned threats write that “our client therefore has a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information.
“In all the circumstances, given the lack of any legitimate or genuine justification for publicising it, whether on X, Substack or otherwise, there can be no publication interest or justification in the publication you have threatened and already effected, let alone one which is sufficiently strong to outweigh the compelling Article 8 rights of our client.”
Some mistake, surely? Firstly, Delo brought up his conviction himself in his Telegraph article (even if to dismiss it). And secondly, as the former Spectator editor and now Times columnist Fraser Nelson – hardly a raging pinko – writes on X: “If highlighting the criminal records of those bankrolling UK political parties is not in the public interest, what is?”.
And thirdly, the letter also uses the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 as an argument against publishing past convictions, but as the media law expert David Banks writes, also on X: “The Rehab of Offenders Act carries no penalty for publication either. What it does do is deny a publisher the use of Truth or Privilege as a defence if sued for libel, BUT ONLY if the claimant can show malice on the part of the publisher. This has never happened.”
Still, at least it gave everyone a giggle at the solicitors’ use of the European Convention on Human Rights, a convention which Reform is committed to leaving as and when it gets into power. The ‘policies’ section of its website is unambiguous that the UK “will leave the European Convention on Human Rights”.
“We are not sovereign all the while we are part of the ECHR, the European Council and its associated court. It’s as simple as that,” said Nigel Farage on one of his rare forays to the Commons last September. Unless, of course, the party of free speech uses it to shut someone up.
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