Nadhim Zahawi, a high-profile defector from the Conservatives to Reform UK, chairs the advisory board of a luxury property developer in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), DeSmog can report.

Former Tory chancellor Zahawi joined Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party on 12 January amid a string of recent Conservative defections.

Farage often portrays Reform as an “anti-establishment” party taking on corporate and political “elites”, yet Zahawi’s record doesn’t conform to this image.

Since May 2025, he has served as chairman of the advisory board at Omniyat, a property developer in Dubai, UAE. Zahawi stood down as an MP at the 2024 general election.

Posting on LinkedIn last year, Zahawi said that Omniyat wants to shape “the future of ultra-luxury living”.

The company’s website states that it achieved $800.2 million (£583 million) in sales in 2024, flogging 37 percent of the properties in Dubai listed for more than $10 million (£7.3 million).

Zahawi – along with his new Reform UK colleagues – has extensive property assets. In 2022, it was reported that he controlled a family property empire worth £100 million.

His business interests have long been the subject of controversy. While serving as chancellor in 2022, Zahawi paid a £4.8 million bill to HMRC – including a £1.1 million penalty charge – over a tax “error”. He was sacked as the Conservative Party’s chairman in 2023 after an ethics inquiry found he had failed to disclose that HMRC was investigating his taxes.

When announcing his defection, Farage said that he hoped Zahawi could raise “huge amounts of money” for Reform.

As revealed by DeSmog, senior Reform politicians have been amassing close ties to the UAE government, an autocratic monarchy whose wealth is heavily derived from oil and gas revenues.

Farage received front-row tickets to the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in December courtesy of the Abu Dhabi government, while Reform treasurer Nick Candy has been in business with a property company owned by the UAE since October 2024.

Zahawi attended the 2023 COP28 climate summit in Dubai as a guest of the UAE, and was part of a bid by an investment firm backed by the UAE to buy the Telegraph Media Group that year.

He also spoke at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair last year, which is headed by UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Zahawi was promoting the Arabic language version of his memoir, The Boy from Baghdad.

Reform, which campaigns to scrap the UK’s climate policies and ramp up fossil fuel extraction, has been funded heavily in the past by polluting interests and those who refute basic climate science.

The party received 92 percent of its donations between the 2019 and 2024 UK elections from oil investors, major polluters, and climate science deniers, while Candy has claimed the party is actively raising money from oil executives.

“Given the party’s growing traction, Reform cosying up to an authoritarian petrostate should worry us all,” Jon Noronha-Gant, a senior investigator at Global Witness, previously told DeSmog.

Omniyat and Zahawi were approached for comment.

Zahawi’s Net Zero U-turn

Writing for the Daily Mail about his reasons for joining Reform, Zahawi complained that the UK has “an energy secretary hell-bent on pursuing a net zero policy which will bankrupt the country.”

However, this contradicts his previous views on the subject. In 2021, as Boris Johnson’s secretary of state for education, Zahawi spoke at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow about the importance of climate action.

“We want to deliver a better, safer, greener world for future generations of young people and education is one of our key weapons in the fight against climate change,” he said.

He announced a series of climate policies, including a scheme to install solar panels in schools and replace their gas and coal boilers.

Specifically endorsing the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target, he added: “The COP26 summit has further amplified the UK’s commitments to become a world leader in sustainability right across the education system by engaging young people and bringing them on our journey towards net zero and a green future.”

In a debate in Parliament in February 2022, Zahawi again backed net zero, stating: “We also need to adapt our economy and society to meet our commitment to net zero by 2050 and maintain our global leadership on climate change following COP26, with all the opportunities that there are in those new and emerging sectors for the economy.” 

Zahawi is not the only Tory-to-Reform defector to U-turn on net zero. In September, Conservative MP Danny Kruger jumped ship, declaring: “We need large-scale reindustrialisation and an end to the madness of net zero.”

But in articles on his website unearthed by DeSmog, the former Tory called climate change “one of the greatest challenges we face”, warned of “the threat from global warming”, and praised government climate action for “protecting our planet for centuries to come”.

It appears that both Zahawi and Kruger were correct in their previous guises. While the net zero economy is growing at 10 percent a year, according to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), it has been estimated that Reform’s anti-climate policies would wipe £92 billion off the UK economy by the end of the decade.

A version of this article has been published by The New World.