Tether's Major Shareholder Invests £12 Million to Support the "British Version of Trump" in the Crypto Sector

Original author: angelilu, Foresight News

Yesterday, the UK's Financial Times reported that the UK's Labour government is about to announce a new rule: companies donating to UK political parties must in the future declare the true individual identities behind the donations.

The cause of this new rule is a series of scandals involving foreign funds infiltrating British politics. However, when it comes to foreign funds, one cannot overlook a "hidden" crypto billionaire who funds the "British Trump" through dual citizenship.

According to the latest quarterly political donation data released by the UK Electoral Commission on March 5, 2026. Reform UK topped the list of quarterly fundraising among UK political parties again with £5.5 million, but one of the donations, amounting to £3 million, came from the same individual, with the source location listed as Thailand.

The donor is named Christopher Harborne. Sometimes, he is called Chakrit Sakunkrit.

He resides in Thailand, holds Thai citizenship, owns approximately 12% of the parent company of the world's largest stablecoin issuer, Tether, under his Thai name, operates one of the world's largest private aviation fuel networks, and simultaneously channels political funds to a right-wing party thousands of miles away in the UK. Over the past two years, he has used this wealth to bet on one thing: propelling Farage and Reform UK into a position of power in British politics.

Image source: Lesley Martin / AFP via Getty Images

Cambridge Engineer & Bangkok Recluse

In December 1962, Christopher Charles Sherriff Harborne was born in England. He completed his secondary education at Westminster School, whose alumni list includes names of British Prime Ministers, judges, and bankers, placing it at the very top of the elite pipeline of the empire.

Next was Downing College, Cambridge, where he earned a dual degree in engineering and management. Following that, he attended INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, obtaining an MBA and graduating in 1988.

His first job was as a management consultant at McKinsey, where he worked for five years. McKinsey consultants from that era typically followed a career arc leading to executive positions in investment banks or multinational corporations. But Harborne did not. He went to Asia, started a research company, and then in 2000 founded Sherriff Global Group, a commodity trading firm initially focused on high-risk offshore services, named after his paternal family surname.

Around 2005, he moved his family to Thailand. That same year, he registered AML Global Ltd. there, an aviation fuel brokerage company. Today, AML Global has over 1,200 supply points globally and is one of the world's largest private aircraft fuel brokers.

In 2011, he officially obtained Thai citizenship, taking the name Chakrit Sakunkrit. From then on, a British citizenship certificate and a Thai nationality certificate coexisted in the same person's pocket.

No one knows his family situation. No spouse, no children, no verifiable records of private life. He never gives media interviews, rarely appears in public, and has no social media accounts. In an attention economy era fueled by exposure, he uses complete invisibility as his protective talisman.

Crypto Sector Investments

In 2011, when Bitcoin was still a secret whisper within geek circles, Harborne bought in. In 2014, he bought Ethereum, a timing earlier than the vast majority of institutional investors.

But what truly changed his position in the crypto world was a hacking attack in August 2016.

That summer, the exchange Bitfinex was attacked, losing Bitcoin worth approximately $72 million—at today's prices, that figure is close to $7 billion. Bitfinex could not immediately fully compensate users, so it adopted a controversial solution at the time: issuing a token called BFX to all affected users, representing a claim against the exchange, with a promise of future redemption.

Most users chose to sell, panic-discounting, eager to exit.

Harborne chose to buy, and kept buying, eventually accumulating, under the name Chakrit Sakunkrit, approximately 12% of the equity in Bitfinex and its parent company, DigFinex, which also owns Tether.

This was not a small bet. Tether, under DigFinex, is today the issuer of the world's largest stablecoin, USDT, with daily trading volumes consistently ranking among the top crypto assets globally and a market cap exceeding $140 billion. Holding 12% of DigFinex equity means Harborne stands within the core circle of the global crypto-dollar system.

But this equity also brought him trouble. In March 2023, The Wall Street Journal published an investigative report on Tether and Bitfinex's banking arrangements. The article linked Harborne and his aviation fuel company AML Global to the pathways through which Tether/Bitfinex accessed the US banking system, suggesting he intentionally concealed his identity when opening an account at Signature Bank under his Thai name, Chakrit Sakunkrit.

Harborne promptly filed a lawsuit, accusing The Wall Street Journal of publishing false allegations of "fraud, money laundering, and financing terrorism," and formally filed the case in Delaware Superior Court in February 2024. The Wall Street Journal subsequently removed the paragraphs involving Harborne and AML Global from the report and stated in an editor's note: "This paragraph was removed to avoid any possible implication... that Harborne or AML engaged in any concealment or falsification of information during the account application process."

The lawsuit was allowed to proceed.

The Biggest Variable in UK Politics

Beyond aviation fuel and crypto equity, Harborne has a third identity: one of the biggest individual donors in British political history.

His political path is a traceable trajectory of right-wing bets. In earlier years, he donated to the Conservative Party and also gave £1 million to support Boris Johnson's campaign. But in 2019, when Brexit negotiations repeatedly stalled in the Conservative-dominated parliament, he felt the Conservatives lacked sufficient determination to push Brexit through 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 traveled to Ukraine with Johnson to attend the Yalta European Strategy Forum in the capacity of an "advisor to Boris Johnson's office," reportedly meeting with senior Ukrainian officials and President Zelenskyy. This role was never 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: Labour holds a clearly skeptical stance towards cryptocurrency, with Labour MP Rushanara Ali publicly calling for a ban on political parties accepting crypto donations, calling them a "potential channel for foreign interference in democracy"; the Conservatives, on the other hand, have long been slow to act on crypto regulation, remaining at the level of statements.

Farage's Reform UK was the only option left. Farage is also often called the British Trump.

Third quarter of 2025: £9 million. The largest single donation from a living donor to a single political party in British political history, setting a record in one go. Fourth quarter: another £3 million. For the entire year of 2025, his donations to Reform UK exceeded £12 million.

An Investment with Expected Returns

Harborne rarely speaks publicly about his donation motives. A rare exception was his brief statement: "The UK has not made the most of Brexit, we have not kept pace in 21st-century technology."

But it's hard for outsiders to ignore another, clearer line of logic: he holds approximately 12% of the parent company of the world's largest stablecoin, Tether. The UK becoming a crypto-friendly regulatory environment has direct commercial value for his core assets. Political donations, in a sense, are also an investment—just the asset is policy, not tokens.

The timeline makes this judgment even harder to ignore. Reform UK's public embrace of cryptocurrency occurred *after* receiving Harborne's large donations. Farage announced that if Reform UK came to power, it would introduce a "Crypto Assets and Digital Finance Bill," promising to cut crypto capital gains tax, allow tax payments in cryptocurrency, and establish a national Bitcoin reserve. In June 2025, Reform UK became the first major UK political party to formally accept cryptocurrency political donations. Farage himself later personally invested £215,000 to acquire approximately 6.3% of the shares in the UK Bitcoin treasury firm Stack BTC.

Reform UK denies any direct connection between the two. The Liberal Democrats and Labour have called for an investigation.

The Hidden Logic

In the US, the story of the crypto industry pouring money into supporting Trump to regain regulatory dominance has already been told. In the UK, the same script is replaying—only the lead actor has changed, but the money is still flowing.

The impact of this bet is already partially visible. Reform UK raised £18.6 million in 2025, surpassing the Conservatives' £13.4 million and Labour's £8.2 million, becoming the top fundraising party in the UK. Farage's approval ratings continue to climb, and Reform UK ranks first in multiple polls.

If this trajectory continues, a party explicitly friendly to cryptocurrency could have a chance to lead the UK government, and those who bet early would benefit the most.

The US story has already provided a reference: in 2024, the crypto industry poured over $200 million into congressional candidates. After Trump's victory, the SEC changed leadership, crypto regulatory direction shifted abruptly, and the industry welcomed a long-awaited policy dividend.

The UK story is not yet finished.