Farage's Billionaire Donor Was in Business With Foundation Linked to Iranian Regime

New questions have arisen over Nigel Farage's newest billionaire donor. An investigation has found that businessman Sasan Ghandehari was once in a business partnership with a powerful Iranian religious foundation. The foundation sits under the authority of the country's supreme leader — while Farage himself is known as a fierce critic of Iran.

Hossein Ghandehari, also called Sasan, was little known in the UK until he pledged this summer to give millions to Reform UK. He donated £50,000 to Farage to cover the cost of two passes for the Davos World Economic Forum. He has also said he is moving his tax residency from Switzerland to the UK in order to make 'regular payments' of more than 'one or two million' to the party.

The 61-year-old Iranian-born British businessman says he runs a $10bn (£7bn) fund called HP Trust. But he has declined to give details about how his family made its money, beyond saying the fund owns assets in Europe and North America.

A French arbitration decision has now shed new light on the businessman's past. The document reveals his dealings with Iranian state-linked entities between 2013 and 2016, including his role in a joint venture to supply and build a fibre-optic cable to carry telecoms traffic across Iran.

According to the judgment, the venture was called Omran Razavi International Co. Ghandehari's HP Trust was the ultimate owner of Ori Group, which took a 49% stake in the venture in 2015. The other 51% was owned by Astan Quds Razavi (AQR), a multibillion-pound religious foundation based in Mashhad, Iran's second city.

AQR's leader at the time was Ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi. He had been appointed custodian of the foundation by Iran's first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, and served from the 1979 revolution until his death in 2016. He also remained close to the next supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

The joint venture ended in about 2016. When a hardliner was appointed to replace Vaez Tabasi, the Ghandehari-backed entities were pushed out of the deal. Around the same time, the project's chair, Mohammed Reza Noory, ended up in Iran's infamous Evin prison, serving an 18-year sentence.

The US imposed sanctions on AQR in 2021, saying it controlled large swaths of the Iranian economy. Ghandehari also has business links to another Reform UK donor, John Richard Simpson of Potters Bar, north of London. Simpson's design firm, Interior Architecture Landscape, counts the Ghandehari family as a client, and Simpson gave £200,000 to Reform UK last year.

Ghandehari's lawyers say that, according to Iranian corporate filings, Omran Razavi also owned stakes in Bank Mellat and Bank Tejerat in 2013 — both banks then under sanctions over involvement in Iran's nuclear programme. However, those small stakes were disposed of before Ori Group signed its agreement in December 2014, and the deal was fully approved by authorities in France and the US, the lawyers added.

Another detail has emerged from leaked papers. Judicial papers published by the hacktivist group Edaalat Ali name both Ghandehari and Noory as having been under investigation in Iran after the deal collapsed. Ghandehari's lawyers call the allegations 'bogus', saying fabricating financial and social cases against targets is part of the Iranian regime's playbook. They also said he had not been to Iran for 30 years and his wealth had no connection to the country, since his ancestral property and assets were confiscated in 2016.

Politically, the matter is uncomfortable for Farage. He has been highly critical of Iran over the past year, and in March accused it of being a bigger danger to the UK than Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. In a joint interview with Farage and Ghandehari in July, a newspaper described his business deal in Iran as a project to bring high-speed internet access to the country, without mentioning its connections to regime-linked companies.

How the Ghandehari family built its fortune remains unclear. The fortune was estimated at $2bn when his late mother bought a property on London's 'billionaire's row' in 2008, and is now reported at $10bn. In a recent court case over a Picasso painting, when asked to prove he could afford £1.5m in legal costs, his lawyers pointed only to a brochure from his Davos trip. A letter from a partner at an accountancy firm was later withdrawn. For now, the questions over Reform UK's new donor's wealth and past dealings remain.