Ben Delo

of inaccurate reporting.

The organisation behind the independent investigation into the late Jason Arday's Cambridge appointment is backed by billionaire Reform UK mega-donor Ben Delo, who also finances a Westminster political hub that has hosted a APORIA, a platform promoting anti-black race science.

Byline Times has established the Committee for Academic Freedom, CAF, has previously publicly acknowledged DLO's support.

though how much he has given to it is unclear.

More booty.

On September 11th, news broke that Ben Delo, another crypto billionaire and a self-described maths geek, gave reform the equivalent of $48.7 million, the largest single political donation in UK history.

As he explained in an opinion piece published in The Telegraph, he wanted to help reform turn into a credible governing party.

Mr. Harbourn apparently felt one-upped.

Mr. Farage says his party is the voice of ordinary people.

There's nothing ordinary about the two billionaires now bankrolling the party.

Both have spent much of their careers overseas, though Mr. Delo said he has returned to Britain specifically so that he can give reform as much money as he wants.

To Ben Habib, a former deputy leader of reform and now a critic of Mr. Farage, catering to rich emigres is no better than catering to poor immigrants.

and new footage has shown that a senior Reform UK official questioned the legality of £72 million of donations three months before they were received.

Suspended head of policy for Reform UK, James Orr, has been shown in undercover footage released to The Guardian by investigative reporting group Verbatim to have raised concerns about the legality of donations from billionaires Christopher Harbourn and Ben Delo, due to an upcoming retroactive cap on overseas donations.

Orr's concerns revolved around Delo and Harbourn having been, for the most part, living overseas, but the discussion also revealed that the party would attempt to fight through the cap with a judicial review.

or a suspension came after earlier footage showed him discussing ways to allow donations from a donor base in the US, and that matter is still under police investigation.

Reform UK has denied any wrongdoing in the donations, and has claimed both were perfectly legal.

And it's worth noting that Aporia has access to this hub in Westminster called The Sanctuary.

It's kind of an office space, an event space that's been funded by the Reform UK mega-donor, Ben Delo.

Ben Delo, listeners might recall, were recently gave, along with Christopher Harborne, together they gave £72 million to Reform UK, the largest that any political party has ever received at any time.

It's absolutely astonishing.

And this guy, you know, Ben Dillow is a crypto billionaire.

... went out in Hong Kong and found two other technologists.

One to help build a trading system, that was Ben Delo, and the other to build the web architecture, and that was Samuel Reed.

They were both in Hong Kong doing other things, but they were interested in crypto.

I found them through friends of friends, and then I pitched them on this idea of let's build a derivatives platform because that's where all the money's gonna be made in exchange space.

It wasn't really until 20, 2020 until somebody, you know, Binance and FTX came out with their own product, because it was technologically very difficult to do this, and you really had to rebuild your trading system from scratch to be able to handle this type of product and margin everyone asynchronously tick by tick.

We were able to do it 'cause we use, uh, KDB, which is a very esoteric, um, language that's used in trading applications at banks.

'Cause, you know, Ben Delo is a, you know, KDB engineer, uh, at an investment bank.

But over time, everyone started, you know, figured out how to do it, and, you know, that's why, you know, call it early 2020 is when you had all these other people who n- now could technologically offer the perp because it took them a while to actually figure out how to build the trading engine to support the product.

It's not set to look like 24/7 rolling coverage that we see on the BBC or on Sky News, but instead it will apparently focus on longer form video content.

The Telegraph reports that it's being paid for with the record-breaking 72 million pound donations that it received from crypto billionaires Christopher Harben and Ben Delo.

Reform are currently hiring for a number of roles for this endeavor, from multimedia journalists to executive editors, studio engineers, and video producers.

When we talked earlier about auth- authoritarian movements and, and stuff, I mean, is this just straight out of the fascist playbook?

Just to, to kind of understand the scale of this, is the issue donations made in crypto or donations made by people who got rich from crypto? I think there's a lot of confusion around this, and we're, we're talking as the UK government has, uh, has put in a moratorium on donations in cryptocurrency.

At the same time, Reform, um, have had two massive £36 million donations from two people who made money in crypto, uh, Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne.

£72 million.

That's the amount that Reform UK took in donations just in the past few days.

It's controversial because the government is already discussing curbs to the amount that particular individuals can give to British political parties.

What the government is discussing is curbs on the amount that Brits who are living overseas can give to British political parties.

The two individuals who've given this money to Reform UK, Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne, have at different times been living in Hong Kong, in Delo's case, and in Thailand, in Harborne's case.

And I think a lot of conflation is happening between the two.

The contributions prompted discussion among the UK government over whether to ban large political contributions from British citizens who live overseas.

That conversation has been renewed as the Reform Party has accepted contributions amounting to seventy-two million pounds, or ninety-seven million dollars, half from Harborne and the other half from BitMEX founder Ben Delo.

Delo and other BitMEX co-founders were charged in the US in twenty twenty for violations of anti-money laundering laws.

Delo ultimately was sentenced to probation and paid a ten million dollar fine.

In twenty twenty five, Delo and the other BitMEX co-founders were pardoned by President Trump.

Quote, if you don't pay taxes, if you don't live here, you can't buy your way into our democracy because you're a billionaire, said Housing Secretary Angela Rayner in an interview arguing for the Labour Party's planned legislation.

I would argue that even if billionaires do pay taxes and live somewhere, they shouldn't be able to buy their way into democracy, but I suppose it's a start.