The conviction of Farage's latest megabucks donor

“Billionaire expat moves back to UK to donate millions to Reform,” cheered a headline in the Daily Telegraph, as the paper welcomed the news a man called Ben Delo was returning from Hong Kong to bankroll Nigel Farage’s Turquoise Tories.

Belo, an entrepreneur, is reacting to new rules brought in by Labour that limit political donations above £100,000 to those resident in the UK – a policy likely to hit Reform, many of whose patriotic supporters curiously choose to live anywhere except Britain.

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 gives me hope is that they seem serious about doing the hard graft, such as running local councils, where they have already encountered many challenges but will learn vital lessons about the realities of governing,” Delo writes in the paper of the party which has seen more than 70 councillors resign or be expelled in the 10 months since they were elected.

“The party is developing the institutional character to address uncomfortable truths, take difficult decisions with firmness and tact, and weather inevitable unpopularity” he adds. He also lavishes praise on the “principled and formidable” Kemi Badenoch and describes Rupert Lowe – the far right MP too wacky even for Reform and wants mass deportation of even British citizens – as “a breath of fresh air”.

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What he devotes considerably less attention to, though, is the fact that Delo 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 mentions this in his Telegraph article, but sniffily dismisses it as it “isn’t even a crime in the UK”. So that’s alright then!

The businessman also writes in the article about his autism, saying how “as a boy I was kicked out of three primary schools before being diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome.

“I discovered early on that the world isn’t set up for people like me. I didn’t like noisy classrooms back then. I still don’t like having to guess implicit social codes. And, like many other people on the spectrum, I really don’t like lying to be nice.”

So it’s interesting he’s decided to back Farage, who was attacked by the National Autistic Society last year after he claimed that doctors are “massively over-diagnosing” children with special educational needs and mental health conditions. Farage had argued that “mental illness problems and those with other general behavioural disabilities” were overdiagnosed and it was “creating a class of victims in Britain that will struggle ever to get out of it.”

Finally, the paper also reports how Delo “gave £4m to Reform earlier this year” although, interestingly, there is no record of this on the Electoral Commission’s website.