In the US, the story of the crypto industry spending money to support Trump and regain regulatory control is over. In the UK, the same script is playing out.
Written by: angelilu, Foresight News
Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that the British Labour government is about to announce a new rule: companies that donate to British political parties will be required to declare the true identities of the individuals behind their donations.
The new regulation was triggered by a series of scandals involving the infiltration of foreign funds into British politics. However, the mention of foreign funds inevitably brings to mind a "hidden" crypto billionaire who, through dual citizenship, funded the "British version of Trump."
According to the latest quarterly political donation data released by the UK Electoral Commission on March 5, 2026, Reform UK once again topped the list of UK political parties' quarterly fundraising with £5.5 million. However, one donation of £3 million came from the same person, with the source listed as Thailand.
The donor's name was Christopher Harborne. Sometimes, he was called Chakrit Sakunkrit.
He resides in Thailand, holds Thai citizenship, and controls approximately 12% of Tether, the parent company of the world's largest stablecoin, under a Thai name. He also operates one of the world's largest private aviation fuel networks and supplies political funds to right-wing parties thousands of miles away in the UK. Over the past two years, he has used this wealth to bet on one thing: to put Farage and the Reform Party in power in British politics.
Image credit: Lesley Martin / AFP via Getty Images
Cambridge Engineer & Bangkok Hermit
Christopher Charles Sherriff Harborne was born in England in December 1962. He completed his secondary education at Westminster School, a school whose alumni list includes British prime ministers, judges, and bankers—the very top of the imperial elite assembly line.
Next was Downing College, Cambridge, with a double degree in Engineering and Management. After that, he went to INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, to earn his MBA, graduating in 1988.
His first job was as a management consultant at McKinsey, where he worked for five years. In those days, McKinsey consultants typically saw their careers lead to senior management positions in investment banks or multinational corporations. But Harborne didn't. He went to Asia, started a research firm, and then in 2000 founded Sherriff Global Group, a commodities trading company initially focused on high-risk offshore services, named after his paternal family name.
Around 2005, he moved his family to Thailand. That same year, he registered AML Global Ltd., an aviation fuel brokerage firm. Today, AML Global has over 1,200 supply points worldwide and is one of the world's largest private jet fuel brokers.
In 2011, he officially became a Thai citizen and took the name Chakrit Sakunkrit. From then on, his British citizenship card and Thai citizenship card coexisted in the same person's pocket.
No one knows anything about his family situation. He has no spouse, no children, and no verifiable private life records. He never gives media interviews, rarely appears in public, and has no social media accounts. In an attention economy that operates on exposure, he uses complete invisibility as a shield.
Crypto Layout
In 2011, when Bitcoin was still a closely guarded secret among geeks, Harborne bought in. In 2014, he bought Ethereum, ahead of most institutional investors.
But what truly changed his status in the crypto world was a hacking attack in August 2016.
That summer, the Bitfinex exchange was attacked, resulting in the loss of approximately $72 million worth of Bitcoin—equivalent to nearly $7 billion at today's prices. Unable to immediately compensate users in full, Bitfinex adopted a controversial solution at the time: issuing a token called BFX to all affected users, representing their claims against the exchange and promising future redemption.
Most users chose to sell off their shares, panic-buying at discounted prices, and rushing to exit the market.
Harborne chose to buy and continued to buy, eventually accumulating approximately 12% of the shares of Bitfinex and Tether's parent company, DigFinex, under the name Chakrit Sakunkrit.
This is no small gamble. Tether, owned by DigFinex, is the issuer of USDT, the world's largest stablecoin, with daily trading volume consistently ranking among the top crypto assets globally and a market capitalization exceeding $140 billion. Holding a 12% stake in DigFinex means Harborne is positioned at the core of the global crypto-dollar system.
But this equity stake also brought him trouble. In March 2023, The Wall Street Journal published an investigative report on the bank account arrangements of Tether and Bitfinex, linking Harborne and his aviation fuel company AML Global to Tether/Bitfinex's access to the U.S. banking system, suggesting that he intentionally concealed his identity when opening an account at Signature Bank under the Thai name Chakrit Sakunkrit.
Harborne subsequently filed a lawsuit accusing The Wall Street Journal of publishing false allegations of "fraud, money laundering, and terrorist financing," and formally accepted the case in the Delaware Superior Court in February 2024. The Wall Street Journal later removed paragraphs from its report concerning Harborne and AML Global, stating in an editor's note: "This paragraph was removed to avoid any possible implication…that Harborne or AML withheld or falsified information during the account opening process."
The lawsuit was allowed to proceed.
The biggest variable in British politics
Beyond aviation fuel and crypto equity, Harborne has a third identity: one of the highest-spending individual donors in British political history.
His political trajectory is a predictable right-wing bet. Early in his career, he donated to the Conservative Party and also contributed £1 million to Boris Johnson's election campaign. However, in 2019, when Brexit negotiations repeatedly stalled in the Conservative-dominated Parliament, he believed the Conservatives lacked resolve in pushing for Brexit and instead poured £6 million into Farage's Brexit Party, becoming its largest donor that year. The Brexit Party subsequently won a landslide victory in the European Parliament elections.
In September 2023, he accompanied Johnson to Ukraine as an "advisor to Boris Johnson's office" to attend the Yalta European Strategic Forum, where he reportedly met with senior Ukrainian officials and President Zelensky. This role has never been publicly explained.
In 2024, the Conservative Party suffered a crushing defeat in the general election, and the Labour Party came to power. Both traditional major parties had lost their usefulness: the Labour Party held a clear skeptical stance on cryptocurrencies, with Labour MP Rushanara Ali publicly calling for a ban on political parties accepting cryptocurrency donations, calling it a "potential channel for foreign interference in democracy"; the Conservative Party, on the other hand, had long been slow to act on the issue of crypto regulation, remaining only at the level of making statements.
Farage's Reform Party is the only option. Farage is also often referred to as the British version of Trump.
In the third quarter of 2025, he donated £9 million, setting a new record for the largest single donation by a living donor to a single political party in British political history. In the fourth quarter, another £3 million was donated. For the entire year of 2025, his total donations to the Reform Party will exceed £12 million .
An investment with expected returns
Harborne rarely speaks publicly about his motivations for donating, with the rare exception that he once briefly stated: "Britain has not made the most of Brexit, and we have not kept up with the pace in the 21st-century technology sector."
However, it's hard for outsiders to ignore another, clearer line of reasoning: he holds approximately 12% of the shares in Tether, the parent company of the world's largest stablecoin. If the UK becomes a crypto-friendly regulatory environment, it will have direct commercial value for his core assets. Political donations, in a sense, are also a form of investment—only the target is policy, not tokens.
The timeline makes this assessment even harder to ignore. The Reform Party's public embrace of cryptocurrency occurred only after receiving a large donation from Harborne. Farage announced that if the Reform Party came to power, it would introduce the Crypto Assets and Digital Finance Act, promising to cut capital gains tax on cryptocurrencies, allow tax payments in cryptocurrency, and establish a national Bitcoin reserve. In June 2025, the Reform Party became the first major political party in the UK to formally accept cryptocurrency political donations. Farage himself subsequently invested £215,000 to purchase approximately 6.3% of the shares in Stack BTC, a UK Bitcoin treasury company.
The Reform Party denies any direct link between the two events. The Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party, however, have called for an investigation.
Hidden Logic
In the US, the story of the crypto industry throwing money at Trump to regain regulatory control is over. In the UK, the same script is playing out—only the actors have changed, but the money is still flowing.
The effects of this bet are already visible. The Reform Party is projected to raise £18.6 million by 2025, surpassing the Conservatives' £13.4 million and Labour's £8.2 million, becoming the UK's highest-funded political party. Farage's approval ratings continue to climb, and the Reform Party has topped several polls.
If this trajectory continues, a political party that is clearly friendly to cryptocurrencies will have the opportunity to take over the British government, and those who bet early on will benefit the most.
The story from the United States provides a reference: In 2024, the crypto industry poured over $200 million into congressional candidates. After Trump's victory, the SEC changed its leadership, the direction of crypto regulation shifted dramatically, and the industry ushered in a long-awaited policy dividend.
The story of Britain is not yet finished.
