Farage's billionaire donor was in business with foundation linked to Iran's regime
The Guardian reports that the newest billionaire donor to Nigel Farage's Reform UK party, Hossein Ghandehari, was in a joint venture in the mid-2010s with a religious foundation under Iran's supreme leader. His lawyers say the aim was to promote political change through wider access to information.
The newest billionaire donor to Nigel Farage, leader of the UK party Reform UK, was previously in business with a powerful Iranian religious foundation answerable to the country's supreme leader. That is shown by a French arbitration ruling found by the Guardian, and it raises questions about the donor's past dealings with Iran, a country Farage openly criticises.
The donor
Hossein (Sasan) Ghandehari, a 61-year-old Iranian-born British businessman, was little known in the UK until this summer. He pledged millions to Reform UK and gave Farage £50,000 to cover two passes to the World Economic Forum in Davos. He says he is moving his tax residence from Switzerland to the UK. Ghandehari says he runs a $10bn fund called HP Trust but has not explained how his family made its money.
The Iranian deal
The ruling indicates that between 2013 and 2016 Ghandehari was the main investor in a project to supply and build a fibre-optic cable carrying telecoms traffic across Iran. HP Trust's Ori Group took a 49% stake in the joint venture, Omran Razavi International Co, in 2015. The other 51% belonged to Astan Quds Razavi, a foundation based in Mashhad that the US sanctioned in 2021, saying it controls large parts of the Iranian economy. The venture ended around 2016, when a hardliner took over the foundation's leadership.
The ruling also links Ghandehari to another Reform UK donor, John Richard Simpson, whose design firm gave the party £200,000 last year. Simpson took over Ghandehari's company Orico General Trading in order to wind it down.
The response
Ghandehari's lawyers say he sought to promote political change through greater access to information, and that US and French authorities approved the deal. They say Iranian authorities falsely accused him after 2016 of working with hostile western powers, and that he has not been to Iran in 30 years.
