Nigel Farage’s donors have paid for him to take trips around the world to the tune of £151,000 since July 2024, DeSmog can reveal.
Farage jetted off to the elite networking forum Davos in Switzerland last week during which he stated that the world would be a “better place” if the U.S. took control of Greenland – an objective of U.S. President Donald Trump.
His trip was paid for by the family trust of Iranian billionaire Sasan Ghandehari, a venture capitalist.
This has been a common theme of Farage’s time in Parliament, with the Reform UK leader having made at least seven trips abroad to cheerlead for Donald Trump or attend events associated with the U.S. president, paid for by wealthy donors.
A version of this article was published by The Mirror.
Farage’s most expensive trip came in November last year, when he flew with two staff members to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for an event celebrating U.S. military veterans. According to official records, the trip was funded to the tune of £55,000 by Bassim Haidar, a Nigeria-born Lebanese billionaire who donated £355,000 to Reform last year.
The Reform leader has also taken multiple trips to the U.S. on the dime of Reform’s biggest donor, crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who gave £9 million to the party in August.
In January last year, Harborne shelled out nearly £28,000 for Farage to travel to Washington D.C. for Trump’s inauguration, after paying £33,000 the previous summer for Farage to fly to the U.S. and campaign for Trump’s re-election.
The latter trip drew controversy after experts and campaigners suggested that it could have been seen as a donation to the Trump campaign.
Farage’s other donor-funded flights have included jetting off in December 2024 to meet tech boss and Trump donor Elon Musk, who has subsequently called Farage “weak”. This trip was funded by Reform backer and Farage’s “fixer” George Cottrell.
The same month, the New York Young Republicans Club paid for Farage to attend its annual gala. The group was disbanded in October 2025 after Politico documented racist WhatsApp messages from its members.
Farage has accepted all of these gifts despite earning more than £1 million a year, largely through his non-parliamentary work. Research by Persuasion UK has indicated that Farage’s closeness to Trump is one of his key political vulnerabilities.
Douglas Parr, Greenpeace UK’s policy director, said that Farage “claims to be a man of the people, promising to put the British working class before billionaires and multinational corporate interests,” and yet “has accepted free flights from billionaire donors to attend pro-Trump events worth more than the average Clacton resident earns in five years.”
As DeSmog has previously reported, Farage spent his first year in Parliament attending events at home and abroad during which he echoed Trump’s anti-climate conspiracy theories.
Trump has called climate change a “hoax” – an attitude mirrored by Farage, who has claimed it’s “absolutely nuts” for carbon dioxide to be considered a pollutant.
Climate scientists at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, have stressed that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
Meanwhile, both Farage and Trump have received extensive financial support from fossil fuel interests and other polluting industries.
As revealed by DeSmog, Reform received 92 percent of its funding between the 2019 and 2024 elections from fossil fuel investors, climate science deniers, and major polluters. The fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of billions on the 2024 U.S. presidential race and 2023 congressional contests, according to figures compiled by the advocacy group Climate Power.
“Nigel Farage is a fraud,” a Green Party spokesperson said. “He pretends to be a patriot, while jetting off to hang out with the American far-right when Trump dishonours all the British troops that died fighting for America”.
Reform was approached for comment.
