🚨 THEY'RE ALL IN IT TO TETHER #Tethered: How the @WhiteHouse is Helping Reform UK’s Finances - Trump’s commerce chief has been promoting the business interests of Farage’s main donor. By Sam Bright and Olly Hayneson, for @DeSmog Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has stood to gain financially from the crypto connections linking it to Donald Trump’s administration, DeSmog can report. Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been accused of shaping laws that have benefitted Tether, a firm that issues the most traded cryptocurrency in the world. Lutnick’s family owns Cantor Fitzgerald, which holds a stake in Tether and provides financial services to the crypto giant. Reform’s largest donor Christopher Harborne is one of Tether’s shareholders and is believed to derive much of his £18.2 billion fortune from a 13 percent stake in the company. Tether is currently attempting to secure a multi-billion dollar injection of private finance that would dramatically elevate its value. The company previously indicated that it hoped to achieve a valuation of £500 billion – making it one of the world’s largest companies and giving a windfall to its shareholders, including Harborne and Cantor Fitzgerald. If this happens, Harborne’s wealth would multiply – it’s estimated he would become the 30th richest person in the world – and would have near-unlimited resources to devote to his political donations. Lutnick has denied influencing the Trump administration’s policies in favour of Tether specifically, while there’s no evidence that decisions have been taken by the U.S. government to directly boost Reform’s finances. However, this case shows how White House policies, allegedly moulded by Lutnick, have stood to significantly but indirectly benefit Farage’s principal patron. DeSmog can also reveal that Reform received £75,000 last year from two executives at brokerage firms controlled by Cantor Fitzgerald. Timothy Charles Mallott, the chief operating officer of BGC Group’s EMEA division, donated £50,000, while Richard Barnett, the CEO of Mint Partners, gave £25,000. They donated in a personal capacity. Farage has returned to the House of Commons after winning last week’s Clacton by-election and is facing an investigation by Parliament’s standards commissioner into a £5 million undeclared gift he received from Harborne prior to the 2024 general election. The investigation will assess whether Farage was in politics at the time of the gift and therefore should have registered it when he first became an MP in July 2024. Farage has said he has “no case to answer” and that he’s the victim of an “establishment hit job”. Harborne has given more than £25 million to Reform since its creation in 2019 – the majority of the party’s funds. Reform has also been heavily funded by fossil fuel interests, aristocrats, and those linked to offshore tax havens. Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald, and Tether Lutnick, a financier, is a longstanding Trump associate. He appeared on Trump’s NBC show, The Celebrity Apprentice, in 2008 and operated in the same New York real estate circles as the now-president. When Trump won re-election in November 2024, he charged Lutnick with co-chairing his transition team – managing the handover of power. That role gave Lutnick influence over crucial policies and job appointments in the new Trump administration – including those relating to crypto regulation. According to Bloomberg, Lutnick used his pivotal position in Trump’s team to shape new legislation that benefitted Tether. Lutnick reportedly worked with fellow crypto evangelist Bo Hines, who was hired as Trump’s “crypto point man”, to create the ‘Genius Act’ – a flagship law designed to create sympathetic conditions for the crypto industry in the United States. The Commerce Department has stated that Lutnick was not involved in shaping the parts of the legislation that affect Tether. However, the bill focused in particular on stablecoins – cryptocurrencies, like Tether, that are pegged to the value of traditional currencies, minimising their price volatility. Tether’s key “red lines” were included in the legislation, according to Bloomberg – including a three-year grace period before the industry had to comply with the terms of the Genius Act. There’s also a provision that potentially allows Tether’s principal cryptocurrency, known as USDT, to be regulated from El Salvador – where the company is based – as long as the U.S. determines Salvadoran regulations to be adequate. Tether has said that the Genius Act provides no “special advantages” to the company, stating that the new law will “apply across the industry to any issuer seeking to operate under the framework.” However, as the world’s largest stablecoin provider, Tether stands to benefit disproportionately from the terms of the Genius Act. One month after the bill was signed, Tether hired Hines as its U.S. CEO. Lutnick also has a long-standing business relationship with Tether. In 2021, most banks avoided working with the firm, which along with its affiliates had been fined roughly $60 million for making misleading statements about its losses and reserves, without admitting liability. Lutnick offered a lifeline – agreeing for his financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald to manage Tether’s sprawling assets. One of Tether’s advantages over other crypto providers is that, for every one of its tokens issued, the firm commits to holding the same amount in U.S. dollars or easily converted equivalent assets. This in theory allows anyone holding Tether to turn the cryptocurrency into dollars at any time. There is currently around $180 billion USDT in circulation – backed by $141 billion in U.S. Treasury bills and billions more in other assets. However, back in 2021, doubts were rife about whether Tether held the reserves it claimed. Although the firm insisted it had the assets to back up its currency, U.S. regulators concluded that it had not maintained “100 percent reserves at all times”. And that’s where Lutnick and Cantor Fitzgerald stepped in. As a primary dealer of U.S. Treasury bills, the bank was in a unique position to help, while Lutnick used his public clout to vouch for the ailing stablecoin provider – assuring the media that Tether’s stockpile was sound. “We found every penny,” Lutnick said at a bitcoin conference in July 2024, “but they had it in some pretty God-forsaken places.” Although there have been ongoing doubts about Tether’s inventory – until this month, the firm had never undertaken a full, independent audit – its profits have exploded since Cantor Fitzgerald took stewardship of its finances. Tether declared profits of $13 billion in 2024, one-and-a-half times those of McDonald’s, and $10 billion in 2025. As a result, it has been described as the most profitable company per employee in history. This relationship has also benefitted Cantor Fitzgerald. In 2024, under Lutnick’s stewardship, the firm paid $600 million for a 5 percent stake in Tether – an investment that is now estimated to be worth anywhere between $6 billion and $25 billion. Lutnick no longer owns Cantor Fitzgerald – he was forced to divest from his business interests when he joined Trump’s cabinet. However, ownership of the company has now passed to his children, who have been given a helping hand by Tether. In March, Bloomberg reported that a trust belonging to Lutnick’s children received a loan from the crypto behemoth. The size of the loan, and whether it helped Lutnick’s children to purchase their father’s stake in Cantor Fitzgerald, is unknown. However, Brandon Fitzgerald, who now runs the company alongside his brother Kyle, has spoken of his “blossoming friendship” with Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino. Appearing on a panel event alongside Ardoino in September 2025, Brandon said that, during his time working for Tether in Switzerland, the team “taught me everything I know.” If Tether’s loan helped Lutnick complete a deal that “will ultimately benefit both him and his children, it’s yet another favor his family owes Tether,” Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a former ethics counsel for the District of Columbia, told Bloomberg. She added that this case is “yet another reason for concern that Howard Lutnick may use his government power to benefit Tether, and his children, rather than the public.” A spokesperson for the Commerce Department told Bloomberg that Lutnick divested from his holdings, including Tether, when he joined Trump’s cabinet and “was not involved in any matters relating to the Genius Act’s stablecoin provisions.” A spokesperson for Cantor Fitzgerald and the Lutnick children told Bloomberg that their acquisition of the bank “was funded through multiple sources, multiple companies and multiple trusts at market rates and market prices.” Tether did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment. Reform’s largest donor and Farage’s personal patron, Christopher Harborne, is one of a dozen individuals who own Tether, while his son used to work for the firm. Harborne has no executive role in the company, but his personal wealth – channelled in turn to both Farage and Reform – is heavily derived from Tether. Harborne has pledged to “give even more money” to the party following the Labour government’s attempts to cap overseas political donations. Harborne is based in Thailand and has a Thai name – Chakrit Sakunkri – although he has now registered to vote in the UK to avert restrictions on his political donations. His philanthropy may also be unleashed by Tether’s planned expansion – with the firm attempting to raise billions from investors to boost its valuation. Even if the company achieves a $300 billion valuation – significantly below its initial target – Harborne’s stake would be worth upwards of $30 billion. Farage has also been touting Tether and lobbying for U.S.-style crypto regulations to be introduced in the UK. Speaking on LBC in September 2025, Farage said: “Tether is about to be valued as a $500 billion company. This world is enormous, and I’ve been urging for years that London should embrace it. We should become a global trading centre for this stuff under proper regulation.” The day after that interview, Farage made his case directly to the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, reportedly urging the Bank to turbocharge the UK crypto sector and drop plans to launch a state-issued rival to Tether. Although Bailey claimed that Farage’s lobbying fell on deaf ears, the Bank later ditched its plan to limit the amount of stablecoins that any individual can hold. Harborne has denied that he’s influenced or sought to influence any politician in support of cryptocurrencies or any other of his business interests – which include a major jet fuel supplier. “With its aggressive lobbying operations and off-the-scale donations to super PACs, the crypto industry has largely captured crypto policy in the United States. And we are now seeing some alarming symptoms of this developing in the UK,” said Tim Picton of Spotlight on Corruption. “Tether’s continued dominance of the stablecoin market would be hugely advantageous to at least one of Reform UK’s donors. But it should also be noted that under the current Labour government, the Treasury has been making some concerning overtures to its U.S. counterparts around finding regulatory alignment over stablecoin policies. “There is a risk that this could open the door to the UK adopting the same carve outs and accommodations that the Trump administration is making for firms such as Tether. We should be under no illusions that when it comes to our market integrity, this would be playing with fire.” Crypto Kings Farage, who has promised to bring about a “crypto revolution” if he becomes prime minister, also has a personal stake in the industry – having invested £215,000 in the bitcoin treasury company Stack BTC earlier this year. Tether makes its vast profits through its colossal reserves – both the appreciation of those assets and the interest earned on them. In addition to over $100 billion in Treasury bills, that includes vast quantities of bitcoin and gold. At the end of last year, the firm claimed to hold $24 billion in gold reserves – stored in a Swiss former nuclear bunker described as a “James Bond kind of place” by Ardoino, who has suggested that Tether is one of the biggest gold central banks in the world. In fact, the company deals so heavily in gold that it sways the global market. As the Financial Times reported in November 2025: “Tether has been making bullion purchases so large that” the firm “probably helped underpin gold’s 64 percent gain last year.” And one of those who may stand to benefit is Farage – who has made over £770,000 as an ambassador for the gold dealer Direct Bullion, his largest declared source of income since July 2024. Trump himself made $1.4 billion from various crypto schemes and investments in 2025, after his campaign received $60 million from industry interests during the 2024 presidential election. Farage has also made large sums from pro-Trump groups in recent years. Since being elected to Parliament, Farage has been paid more than £11,000 to speak at Hillsdale College – a conservative university in Michigan – and nearly £28,000 to speak at the ‘Club for Growth’, a lobby group that has endorsed and campaigned for Trump. Farage has also racked up donor-funded flights worth at least £150,000 to speak at pro-Trump events since July 2024 – including £27,000 in flights and accommodation, gifted by Harborne, to attend events celebrating Trump’s second inauguration. The Reform leader has also received £47,000 from Trump-donating U.S. tech giants X Corp, Google, and Meta. And senior Reform figures have actively fundraised for Trump. In June 2024, Reform treasurer Nick Candy co-hosted an event that reportedly raised £1.6 million for his re-election campaign, attended by Farage, Donald Trump Jnr., and Lutnick. As reported by DeSmog, Farage has also spent many of his Commons appearances echoing Trump’s grievances with UK government policy, and has close ties to several groups – including climate science denial lobby groups – that have helped to shape Trump’s second term agenda. Speaking at CPAC, the annual pro-Trump gala, a month after the president’s second inauguration, Farage said that the U.S. was at the “beginning of a golden age”. He added: “In fact, in many ways what we’re fighting for is a very similar agenda to the one you’ve just fought for, and the one you have succeeded with.” CPAC hosted an event in London this July, with Farage as the star speaker. The conference was sponsored by crypto lobbyists. Reform, Harborne, Farage, Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald, Hines, Mallott, Barnett, the Commerce Department, and the White House were approached for comment. desmog.com/2026/08/20/tether…

🚨 On 20 August 2026, privately educated multimillionaire Zia Yusuf posted a tweet accusing the Mail and The Spectator of running "hit pieces" against him, resting on "easily falsifiable lies." Well if anyone knows all about easily falsifiable lies, it's shameless proven frequent liar, Zia Yusuf. As evidence, he cited a Freshwater Strategy/City AM poll showing he had 'the third-highest favourability rating and the lowest unfavourability rating of any right-wing politician tested', and was 'more popular with women than men'. He claimed the criticism has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with a "corrupt establishment" trying to stop him and privately educated multimillionaire former City trader Farage. Let's have a look at Yusuf's claims individually, because while the numbers aren't invented out of thin air, Yusuf is stretching their meaning in interesting and revealing ways. The structure of Yusu's tweet should be familiar: media as a coordinated enemy rather than a set of separate outlets with separate editorial judgements; criticism recast as evidence of the critic's fear rather than a claim to be answered; popularity asserted in numbers that don't survive contact with their own source. There's an obvious American precedent, in an American President, who just happens to be mates with Farage. Trump has a well-documented habit of citing whichever number, real or invented, is closest to hand, offered as proof that unfavourable coverage is 'fake' and that he is, contrary to what anyone can see, beloved. Reform figures have increasingly reached for a version of the same toolkit/playbook: the "witch hunt" framing around Farage's Harborne donation; the reflexive use of "traitor" accusations by Tice and Yusuf; the "hit piece" vocabulary Yusuf himself favours, and now this. The UK isn't the US, and imho the interesting part is that Yusuf ran a more sophisticated/disciplined version of it than Trump usually bothers with: real data, selectively framed, rather than invented data, confidently asserted. Yusuf's count of "2 hit pieces" from the Mail and "1" from the Spectator only works if you don't read them. Of the two Mail pieces published on the day he refers to in his tweet, only one is substantively about him. Greg Heffer's news report is a straight write-up of a Richard Tice press conference defending the suspension of Tim Montgomerie, a Reform defector who had called Yusuf "a child" for freezing him out for three months. Yusuf barely features beyond his job title. It is standard lobby journalism, not an attack. Dan Hodges's column is the real target: it argues Yusuf is "reshaping Reform in his own image" while Farage looks unwilling or unable to stop him, citing insiders on the party's internal communications strategy and a contested appointment. The Spectator piece, by Tim Shipman and Harvey Rothman, is where the line Yusuf specifically disputes appears: that he is "probably the most divisive figure at the top of British politics." Treating a neutral news report and a substantive critical column as two identical instances of the same offence inflates the apparent scale of what's being complained about, from one real piece of critical reporting to three. Yusuf's response to being called divisive is to cite his favourability numbers. But divisive doesn't mean unpopular. It means opinion is sharply split. A political figure can have healthy-looking favourability numbers and still be the single most polarising figure in his party, if the people who dislike him do so with unusual intensity. Refuting "divisive" with a favourability score answers a question nobody asked. So what does the survey actually say? I know, because I found and downloaded the data. Yusuf's numbers turn out to be broadly real, once you go to the source: Freshwater Strategy's data tables for the City AM poll (fieldwork 7–10 August 2026, n=1,248). Two of Yusuf's three claims kind of hold up, but only with very significant caveats. Respondents were asked about a very short list of political figures and organisations, and given the options of favourable, unfavourable, neutral, or never heard of (see table below). Before the individual numbers, the field they're being measured against needs to be said plainly, because every ranking that follows depends on it. This table tested just FIVE domestic right-wing figures: Badenoch, Farage, Yusuf, Tice, Jenrick. That's it. British right-wing politics runs to hundreds if not thousands of MPs, peers, councillors, commentators and activists. So when Yusuf says "third highest favourables," he means third out of this five, a shortlist Freshwater itself chose, not third out of the field the phrase is built to suggest. Keep that in view for everything below. In this context, "third highest favourables" is technically correct, but only once you exclude Donald Trump, who was also included. The same data tables include him in the same question, tested alongside the domestic figures: 19.0% favourable, 69.3% unfavourable, 0.5% never heard of. He isn't in the summary table below because he isn't a UK politician, but he was one of the names respondents were actually asked about, which is what Yusuf's "prompted in the poll" means. Restrict the comparison to UK politicians and Yusuf comes third, behind Badenoch and Farage. Include Trump, and Yusuf drops to fourth. The claim survives only via an unstated scope decision, excluding a name that was in fact prompted, that happens to favour him. Yusuf's claim of "lowest unfavourables" (out of just five right-wing political figures) is not strictly true, though the margin is small enough to be a rounding argument rather than a complete fabrication. Richard Tice's unfavourable score, 21.8%, is marginally lower than Yusuf's 22.3%, well within what a slightly different weighting or sampling would flip. Yusuf is tied for lowest, not lowest. Yusuf's wording is absolute, "the lowest," but on the numbers as published, it's wrong. 'More popular with women than men' is genuinely true, and one of the most interesting findings here, because it sort of contradicts an anonymous quote in the Hodges column claiming "Zia doesn't play well with women." His net favourability is −6.8 among women against −10.4 among men. Hardly a massively popular, but it is a real rebuttal to a specific charge. It's worth noting what it isn't, though: a claim to be the most female-friendly figure in this company. Tice's net favourability among women, −5.5, is still better than Yusuf's. Yusuf does relatively better with women than he does with men; he doesn't do better with women than Tice does. None of the above is grounds for dismissing the poll itself. Freshwater Strategy is a British Polling Council member, its representative on the BPC's own list is Matthew Lesh, and the data behind Yusuf's numbers is real and checkable. However, a little digging about its provenance is still worth setting out, because it's part of the story of how an "outlier" figure travels from a data table to a viral defence of a beleaguered spokesman. Freshwater is an Australian consultancy, founded in Sydney in 2022, whose own website describes its purpose not as measuring opinion but as helping clients "shape opinion, manage risk, and identify opportunities... to gain a competitive advantage in commercial and political spheres." One of its co-founders previously worked at Crosby Textor, the Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor consultancy that ran Boris Johnson's mayoral campaigns and advised the Conservative Party for two decades; when the firm launched its London office in 2024, the trade press described it as "launched by personnel from Lynton Crosby's CT Group." Crosby is best known in political circles as the 'master of wedge issues', and it was revealed in 2022 that he'd been attending (then PM) Boris Johnson’s meetings in No 10. Crosby's advisory firm, which has represented Big Tobacco as well as oil and gas interests, was at the heart of Johnson's political strategy. The London expansion of Freshwater was fronted by Matthew Lesh as UK Country Manager, previously Director of Public Policy and Communications at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, both fixtures of the opaquely-funded and extremely influential #TuftonStreet free-market think-tank cluster. Lesh remains a City AM columnist while holding those affiliations. City AM, the poll's publishing partner, has its own place in that ecosystem. @DeSmog's 2018 investigation into Tufton Street's media reach named City AM directly, alongside the Telegraph, as an outlet with "strong ties" to the network, "repeatedly used to push the group's agenda into the media." The paper has continued to platform that agenda since: in April 2025 it ran a piece by Bjorn Lomborg arguing that "the biggest polluter is poverty" and that climate deaths have fallen 98%, the standard sceptic case against net-zero spending. City AM has been owned since 2023 by THG, whose founder Matthew Moulding bought the paper out of administration and stated publicly that its "one rule" should be to "be a cheerleader for both the UK and businesses." None of this makes the specific numbers in the table wrong; BPC membership means Freshwater is bound by the same disclosure rules as YouGov or Ipsos, and the figures held up under direct inspection of the data tables. But a poll commissioned and published through this particular pairing, a firm that describes its own function as shaping opinion rather than only measuring it, promoted via a paper with a documented history of carrying free-market and anti-net-zero messaging, is not a neutral instrument landing by chance in the middle of a Reform news cycle. It's always worth knowing whose data you're looking at, even when the data itself checks out. And always follow the money. That shortlist of political figures itself deserves a second look, because it wasn't drawn at random. It was chosen by a firm whose own stated business is helping clients "identify opportunities," and it happens to be a five-name field in which Yusuf's mediocre numbers still come out looking respectable. Nobody voted Yusuf into that comparison set. Freshwater did, and Reform's own spokesperson is now citing the result as if the shortlist itself were neutral. And underneath all three claims sits the number the tweet never mentions: Yusuf's net favourability is actually −8.6. More people view him unfavourably than favourably. Perhaps even more importantly, nearly a third of respondents, 31.7%, haven't heard of Zia Yusuf at all, which means his favourable share is drawn from a considerably smaller pool of people who've actually formed a view than for Farage (1.1% never heard of) or Badenoch (9.3%). Recalculated as a share of only those aware of him, Yusuf sits at roughly 20% favourable, essentially level with Tice and well behind Badenoch and Farage. None of this supports Yusuf's claim in the tweet that "I reduce tactical voting against Reform." That's not a claim the poll can answer either way, since the question asked was about favourability, not vote-switching or tactical behaviour; there is no tactical-voting item in the tables at all. Yusuf presents a favourability statistic as if it settled a separate, unmeasured question. A relatively strong showing inside a small, unfavourable, low-recognition field is not the same thing as being popular, and neither is the same thing as reducing tactical voting against your party. Put the pieces back together and his tweet does what a well-run version of Trump's approach to ratings, crowd sizes, and approval always does: it takes a real, checkable data point and inflates it into a claim the data doesn't support, while recasting anyone who points that out as part of the 'plot'. The "hit piece" framing turns three separate pieces of journalism, one of them barely about him at all, into a coordinated operation. The bundling of named critics into a single undifferentiated "they" manufactures an enemy bloc out of people who work for different outlets and, in Gove's case, didn't write the piece. The claim that comments "nuked" the claims in the articles asserts a unanimity the comments themselves don't show. And the poll citation, the most sophisticated element of the tweet, takes a genuinely negative net favourability rating and, through selective comparison, an unstated exclusion, and one claim the poll was never capable of testing, converts it into "the opposite of the truth." But that's where we are. Selectively accurate statistics are more dangerous than fabricated ones precisely because a lazy check confirms them and stops there. Trump has spent a decade demonstrating that voters and journalists alike will often do exactly that: verify the figure, wave the argument through. The technique isn't inventing data, it's curating the comparison set, choosing the framing, and omitting the sign, dressed in the same persecution-to-resilience register, hit piece, no right of reply, corrupt establishment, we will not be deterred, that has become Reform's default mode for handling criticism of any kind. What's notable here is only that, for once, some of the underlying numbers check out. The argument built on top of them still doesn't. Without a better informed electorate, we are going to keep listening to manipulative propagandists - from across the political spectrum. Andy Burnham has stated that his aim is to change and "fix" a broken political system by making politics more collaborative and focused on problem-solving rather than point-scoring or adversarial culture; restoring public faith/trust in politics; and radically rebalancing power away from centralised Westminster/Whitehall toward regions, local communities, and people so that politics works for ordinary people and the places they live. If he was serious about this, he'd start with improving the critical thinking and media literacy skills of the entire electorate. Without that, we're on a fast-track to a divided ill-informed dystopia, where few people can discern perception from reality. Maybe this tweet will help us better understand why the gap between perception and reality concerning immigration, crimes committed by foreign nationals and ethnic minorities, and the harms of burning fossil fuels is far wider among Reform UK voters than any other group of voters.

A classic in the genre: one of Reform UK's shameless unprincipled opportunistic propagandists, 'Honest Bob' Jenrick, strongly implies benefits "paid to people who shouldn't have them" drove Britain's £3tn debt to £103k/family, making it feel personal and urgent. Did it fuck. Lying twat. Total DWP fraud+error is £9.5bn (3.3% of spend), and fraud alone is just 2.2% — around £6bn. Against £3tn debt, that's just 0.2%. The real drivers are the 2008 crash, Covid, and health/pension costs. Classic Reform: take a real number, weld it to an 'undeserving-claimant' story, offering a sacrificial scapegoat instead of an explanation.