7OCT

Delo's £4m arrived as cash, not crypto

3 min read

13:09UTC

Reform UK's two biggest gifts of the quarter both came from Ben Delo, a pardoned BitMEX co-founder: £1,000,000 on 17 April and £3,000,000 on 30 April, both in cash.

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PoliticsAssessed

Key takeaway

Reform's largest donor gave £4m in cash, a form the Bill's new crypto ban does not reach.

The Electoral Commission published its register of party donations for the second quarter of 2026 on Thursday 3 September. Reform UK's two largest gifts of the quarter both came from Ben Delo: £1,000,000 accepted on 17 April and £3,000,000 accepted on 30 April, each recorded as cash⁠¹.

Delo was born in Sheffield in 1984 and co-founded the cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMEX. He pleaded guilty in 2022 to a charge under the US Bank Secrecy Act over the exchange's anti-money-laundering failures and received 30 months' probation. Donald Trump pardoned him in March 2025, and he returned to the UK from Hong Kong around April 2026⁠². The register carries no earlier UK political donation in his name⁠³.

Parties accepted £17,085,354 in total across the quarter, and Reform took £5,437,360 of it, ahead of every other party⁠⁴. The Conservative Party reported £4,039,317, the Labour Party £3,609,664, Restore Britain £250,000 and the Green Party £220,890⁠⁵. Delo's two cheques account for 74% of everything Reform accepted between April and June, a concentration no other party in the release approaches. Lose that one donor and the party loses three quarters of a quarter's income.

The ban the Commons wrote into the finance Bill the evening before the register appeared catches donations made in cryptoassets. It does not catch a cash gift from a person whose fortune came out of a crypto exchange, which is what the register records⁠⁶. Nothing on the record suggests anyone arranged that: the gifts were accepted in April, reported in July, and the clause was written in September. No entry from Christopher Harborne appears among the twenty largest gifts of the quarter⁠⁷, the donor whose undeclared £5m gift left the standards inquiry frozen when Farage quit the Commons, and the police inquiry into the Cottrell donations runs on separately.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Every three months, UK political parties have to tell the Electoral Commission, the independent body that regulates elections and party money, who gave them large donations. This report covers April to June 2026. Reform UK took in more money than any other party, £5.44m, and £4m of that came from one man, Ben Delo, a co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX. He gave the money in cash, not in cryptocurrency, so it was not covered by the new ban on crypto donations Parliament had just written into law. Delo pleaded guilty to a US money-laundering compliance offence in 2022 and was pardoned by President Trump in 2025.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The Bill's new clause treats any cryptocurrency donation as coming from an impermissible donor; it targets the form of the gift, not the wealth behind it, so a donor who gives cash sits outside it regardless of where the money came from.

The Electoral Commission has already said it cannot verify Reform UK's crypto wallet addresses because the party's processor, Radom Pay, operates from Poland outside FCA regulation; that verification gap does not apply to cash gifts, which the register can trace, but it shows why regulators focused Reform effort on the asset type rather than tracing donors' wider financial history.

What could happen next?

Consequence
A donor can route crypto-derived wealth into UK politics as cash and remain entirely outside the new ban, since the law targets the instrument, not the source.
Precedent
Delo's gifts set a template other crypto-wealthy donors could follow once the ban takes effect: liquidate first, then donate in cash.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Christopher Harborne's £12m in cryptocurrency donations to Reform UK, and the £37m he has put into Reform UK and Farage personally since 2019, is what forced the crypto-specific ban into the Bill in the first place; Delo's decision to give in cash rather than the token that built his fortune shows a donor adapting the form of a gift to whatever instrument regulators are currently targeting.

Counter-parallel: Delo's history is a US federal case, a 2022 guilty plea under the Bank Secrecy Act followed by a 2025 presidential pardon, so his and Harborne's controversies rest on different legal grounds even though both trace back to cryptocurrency wealth.

Immediate: Reform UK's £5.44m in accepted Q2 gifts is 31.8% of the £17.09m all-party total for the quarter, the largest single-party share; Delo's two cash gifts alone account for roughly three-quarters of Reform's Q2 total.

Structural: Q2's £17.09m sits 30.3% below Q1's election-quarter total of £24.5m but 50.6% above Q2 2025's £11.3m, a pattern consistent with donors pulling back once campaigning ends while remaining more generous than in the equivalent pre-election year, rather than treating May's election as a one-off spike.

Consensus view: Spotlight on Corruption's 1 April 2026 report identified crypto-to-fiat conversion as one of three enforcement gaps surviving the incoming cryptocurrency donations ban, the exact mechanism Ben Delo's cash gifts fall through.

Counter-view: No party or regulator disputes the Q2 return's accuracy; the open question is whether cash funded by crypto-derived wealth should count as a linked donation, a definition the Bill's own text, which treats cryptoasset donations specifically as coming from an impermissible donor, leaves untouched.

Key tension: Whether an instrument-based ban can ever close a wealth-based loophole, since a donor can convert the asset the law targets before the money changes hands.

Sources:Electoral Commission·Electoral Commission

Mentions:Electoral Commission →Reform UK →Conservative Party →Labour Party →Restore Britain →Green Party →Ben Delo →Christopher Harborne →Donald Trump →Parliament →BitMEX →Bank Secrecy Act →Sheffield →Spotlight on Corruption →Hong Kong →Nigel Farage →Radom Pay →

First Reported In

Update #17 · Reform's £4m arrived as cash, not crypto

Electoral Commission· 3 Sept 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Delo's £4m arrived as cash, not crypto

The register shows a crypto fortune entering party finance as cash, a form the Bill's new ban does not reach.

Led to

Delo and Harborne give Reform £72m

Delo's new gift follows his earlier Reform UK donations recorded on the Q2 register.

Occurred 11 Sept 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Rhun ap Iorwerth / Welsh Government (Plaid Cymru)

Ap Iorwerth presented six priorities to the Senedd on 22 September without numeric targets or a named partner party, promising to work across the chamber where there is common ground. He says his government will be judged on results.

Michael Marra / Scottish Labour

Marra won the leadership on 19 September, and three days later his 17 MSPs backed Swinney's right-to-decide motion once their child-poverty amendment was written in. He says Scottish Labour's task is to tell voters what it stands for.

Andy Burnham / Labour Party

Burnham told conference in Liverpool on 29 September that Labour's next manifesto will commit to changing the electoral system, and invited every party into a National Commission on Electoral Reform. He has not named a replacement system, and no chair or remit has been published.

Conservative Party (frontbench peers and Kemi Badenoch)

Conservative frontbench peers argued against retrospective rules at the Lords Second Reading on 14 September, a position that protects gifts made before any cap. Kemi Badenoch rejected Burnham's electoral reform commission on 2 October, accusing him of using it to entrench the left.

Reform UK

Reform denied wrongdoing after the Channel 4 News programme, called the sting a hoax by climate activists and said it would cooperate with the Metropolitan Police. In the same month it announced £36m gifts from Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne.

Steff Aquarone / Liberal Democrats (North Norfolk)

Aquarone told Rayner in the Commons on 7 September that North Norfolk District Council had spent money preparing for a reorganisation the Government has now withdrawn. He puts the cost of the cancelled merger on districts in the four areas.