Nigel Farage makes £2m bitcoin purchase as he backs Kwasi Kwarteng’s cryptocurrency firm

A major cryptocurrency company has announced that Nigel Farage has purchased £2 million worth of Bitcoin in a bid to strengthen ties with the industry.

The Reform UK leader was filmed in a promotional video for Stack BTC, a crypto reserve company headed by former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng of Liz Truss.

The company said the acquisition was a “turning point” in British politics. He claimed Mr Farage was the first MP and the first political party leader in the UK to publicly buy bitcoin. It had invested £215,000 in Stack in March.

Mr Farage and Reform have vowed to liberalize the bitcoin market and have received millions of pounds in donations from crypto billionaires including Thailand-based Christopher Harborne and Hong Kong-based Ben Delo.

The government has moved to ban crypto donations to political parties and asked the Electoral Commission to investigate potential crypto donations that Mr Farage claimed Reform had received but had not yet declared.

Stack, a London-based firm listed on rival UK exchange Aquis, operates by building a portfolio of companies and channeling their excess cash into bitcoin. Its main goal is to build a significant bitcoin treasury through the continuous accumulation of the digital currency.

Labor has questioned why Mr Farage invested his money with Mr Kwarteng, who became Stack’s chairman last October.

Party leader Anna Turley said: “Nigel Farage is hyping up a former Tory chancellor who is crashing the economy to line his own pockets. From Farage’s cryptocurrency raise to his deputy Richard Tice admitting his company hasn’t paid the taxes it owes, Reformation is more concerned with themselves than supporting working people. As Labor tries to clean up the mess left by the Tories, Nigel Farage gets closer to Liz’s architect. Truss’s disastrous mini-budget tells you everything you need to know about whose side he’s on.” “He tells you.”

Mr Farage also defended his deputy, Richard Tice, for the first time over claims he failed to pay dividend tax as required.

Mr Tice, the party’s business spokesman and co-owner of the party with Mr Farage, is accused of failing to pay tens of thousands of pounds in tax on dividends paid to himself and his offshore trust. allegations Sunday Times He claimed he received “overpayments of at least £91,000” as a result of the failure.

Among the critics was tax expert Dan Neidle, who claimed Mr. Tice’s company was “breaking the law.” But Mr Farage dismissed Mr Neidle as “a Labor activist” and suggested Mr Tice actually “probably pays more tax than his company pays in corporation tax”.

He insisted the area of ​​taxation was “extremely complex” but said there was no allegation that Mr Tice had evaded taxes. He said: “Come to think of it, if our biggest critic says that Richard Tice didn’t evade or evade taxes, that he paid the full amount, maybe even a little more, then I’m happy with that.”

At a press conference, Mr Farage and his home affairs spokesman announced plans for an investigation into the so-called “Boris wave” of immigration between 2020 and 2024; yet two of the key players of that period – former home secretary Suella Braverman and former immigration secretary Robert Jenrick – have since defected to Reformation.

He claimed the cost of a generation of non-EU immigrants arriving in the UK in the years after 2021 would be an “economic turning point” for the country.

Mr Farage said: “There is still time. There is still something we can do about this Boris wave. But if more than a few million people get permission to stay indefinitely for the next 18 months, we will be putting an economic millstone around our necks that will, frankly, be disastrous.”

He later defended former Conservatives who served in Mr Johnson’s government and have since defected to Reform UK.

Mr Farage said: “Of course there are those who will say, ‘Oh, but you’ve got Suella Braverman, you’ve got Robert Jenrick in your party’. Yes, absolutely. And if you read what Suella has written about it and Robert has written about it, they’ve tried to stop the disaster from within, which has really properly set in in 2021, and that’s why they resigned or were fired.”

Independent He asked Reform to comment on the cryptocurrency announcement.