Bankers Reported Farage’s £5m Gift Over Laundering Fears
Bankers filed a suspicious activity report to the National Crime Agency in May 2024 over the £5m gift to Nigel Farage from Christopher Harborne, unable to trace the ultimate origin of the funds — a disclosure that landed hours after his resignation announcement. Such reports are not proof of wrongdoing. Farage said he has “no reason to doubt the ultimate source of the money” and claimed the information was “illegally obtained”. Reform’s Richard Tice has asked the NCA to investigate the leak of his own flagged transactions.
The money story now runs ahead of the by-election story, and the timeline is its sharpest edge: part of the £5m reportedly arrived after Farage had ruled himself out of standing in 2024 and shortly before his Clacton U-turn — exactly the sequence the paused standards inquiry was examining, and the reported deadline for his response to the revelations fell an hour before he resigned. The counter-attack — framing the leak itself as the crime — opens a second front that the NCA’s own confidentiality rules make hard to answer publicly. Watch whether the agency acts on either question, and whether more flagged transactions surface.