The Reform donor who may have to take legal action against... himself

At least one of Reform’s megabucks donors isn’t enjoying the scrutiny which comes from handing tens of millions of pounds to a political party.

Substacker James Wilson posted on X at the weekend a legal letter he had received from Ben Delo’s solicitors Addleshaw Goddard, claiming it is unlawful to publish information about their client’s conviction in the US.

Delo pled 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 $10m penalty and Delo was sentenced to 30 months’ probation, although was later pardoned along with two other BitMex founders by Donald Trump.

Suggested Reading

The papers’ hypocrisy over Reform’s £72 million bungs

Rats in a Sack

Now his solicitors appear to be claiming it is unlawful to report this, claiming that Delo “has a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information” and that “given the lack of any legitimate or genuine justification for publishing it, whether on X, Substack or otherwise, there can be no public interest in the publication”.

Perhaps Delo needs to turn his lawyers on himself. As long ago as, er, April 2026 he wrote about his own conviction in the Daily Telegraph, talking about how he “fell foul of US regulators, accepted a plea bargain and a civil fine for a regulatory failing that isn’t even a crime in the UK, but then ended up being pardoned by Donald Trump, the US president”. The article is still available on the Telegraph’s website.

Suggested Reading

Reform and Restore’s false flag operation

Rats in a Sack

Meanwhile, some journalists are struggling with the amounts Delo and fellow crypto bro Christopher Harborne have bunged Reform. At the weekend the Today programme’s Justin Webb had to correct the record after saying that Delo had donated £36 billion.

That was followed by the Sunday Times’s deputy editor Krissi Murison who, in a newsletter promoting a puff piece about what a card Delo is (he once wore a wetsuit to an Oxford dinner), wrote of a “record £72 billion – £36 billion each”.

Perhaps they know something we don’t?