{"id":79981,"date":"2026-07-14T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T12:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/nigel-farage-the-mysterious-crypto-firm-tether-backed-by-reforms-biggest-donor\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T12:00:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T12:00:39","slug":"nigel-farage-the-mysterious-crypto-firm-tether-backed-by-reforms-biggest-donor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/nigel-farage-the-mysterious-crypto-firm-tether-backed-by-reforms-biggest-donor\/","title":{"rendered":"Nigel Farage: The mysterious crypto firm Tether backed by Reform&#8217;s biggest donor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\"><b class=\"ssrcss-1xjjfut-BoldText e5tfeyi3\">Who is the biggest purchaser of the world&#8217;s biggest safe haven asset &#8211; gold?<\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">China? Japan? One of the Gulf countries, perhaps?<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In fact, the single biggest buyer of the precious metal last year was a company you&#8217;ve probably never heard of \u2013 a crypto firm called Tether.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The El Salvador-based company runs USDT, the world&#8217;s biggest stablecoin, which is a form of crypto backed up by hard currency.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It serves as a conduit between riskier, volatile cryptocurrencies and the conventional finance system, essentially used as an offshore dollar.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Yet Tether bought more gold last year than anyone, according to European Central Bank data.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It keeps it stored in a James Bond-style Swiss former nuclear bunker, according to Tether&#8217;s boss.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Tether says it also owns as much US Government debt as some G20 nation states, some $135bn (\u00a3101bn), which is more than South Korea.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It is a huge player, almost taking on the characteristics of a private central bank. Yet it employs just 200 people.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It is also, perhaps inadvertently, entangled in the questions around the funding of Nigel Farage&#8217;s Reform party.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">One of Tether&#8217;s significant shareholders is Christopher Harborne.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Last August, Harborne gave \u00a39m in cash to Farage&#8217;s Reform party \u2013 the biggest party donation in British history. He gave a further \u00a33m to Reform in October and an additional \u00a33m in January. All the donations were declared.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Harborne had given \u00a35m directly to Farage, a previously undisclosed personal gift which was the subject of parliamentary investigations, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c0ly51kzdz3o\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\">before Farage resigned as an MP.<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Farage and Harborne have both said there were no strings attached to the personal gift, nor to the political donations to Reform.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Bank of England&#8217;s governor Andrew Bailey recently confirmed that Farage raised the issue of cryptocurrency regulation and the related issue of central bank digital currencies with him in September last year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He said Farage made his views &#8220;very clear&#8221;, but the &#8220;intervention&#8221; did not change the Bank&#8217;s policy, and that in general he could spot &#8220;lobbying&#8221; and knew how to discount it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">There was a specific issue Farage was concerned about &#8211; speculation that the Bank of England would push ahead with a limit on holdings of potential sterling stablecoins of between \u00a310,000 and \u00a320,000.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The industry was lobbying hard against it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">My understanding is that Farage did not raise Tether specifically with the governor, but he did talk about stablecoin regulation in general.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It raises reasonable questions about the precise details of that conversation and the scope for any possible benefit to Tether and its shareholders from shifts in Bank of England policy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Reform leader had already spoken openly about embracing cryptocurrencies.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company,&#8221; he told LBC presenter Nick Ferrari in September, the day before meeting Bailey.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;This world is enormous, and I&#8217;ve been urging for years that London should embrace it. We should become a global trading centre for this stuff under proper regulation.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">On the wider conversation, Farage&#8217;s team say that &#8220;his remarks to Andrew Bailey are consistent with his long-held belief that the UK should be a global hub for regulated cryptocurrency innovation and investment&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">To that end, last May when Reform was ahead in the polls, the only piece of draft legislation it had published was its Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It had a fleeting reference to stablecoins, and no reference to the Bank&#8217;s existing plan to limit personal holdings.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">I read it and downloaded it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It has since disappeared from the Reform website and from the web generally.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cg4w6wqye32o?at_medium=RSS&#038;at_campaign=rss\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who is the biggest purchaser of the world&#8217;s biggest safe haven asset &#8211; gold? China? Japan? One of the Gulf countries, perhaps? In fact, the single biggest buyer of the precious metal last year was a company you&#8217;ve probably never heard of \u2013 a crypto firm called Tether. The El Salvador-based company runs USDT, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":79982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[61],"tags":[8052,2888,4289,10286,5157,146,531,5156,4936,21223],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79983,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79981\/revisions\/79983"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}