Nigel Farage’s attempt to reach the Chagos Islands military base took place on a private jet which appears to be linked to Reform UK mega-donor Christopher Harborne, it has been revealed.
Harborne, who has donated £12 million to Reform UK, has links to two charter planes that took Farage to the Maldives and, separately, a group of Chagossian activists to Sri Lanka, before they attempted to reach the archipelago by boat.
The Thailand-based aviation and cryptocurrency investor did not respond to requests for comment on whether he owns the planes that facilitated the hack. The trip ended in failure for the UK’s reformist leader after he was unable to reach the islands without permission from the UK government to access the military base.
Farage said he undertook the trip to highlight the plight of the Chagossians, whose families were expelled from the islands in the 1960s and are seeking to return. He also opposes the UK government’s decision to hand over sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius to comply with international law while continuing to rent the base to them.
Although Farage did not reach the islands, he generated attention for Reform as the party sought to set the political agenda over the Chagos Islands controversy.
While a precise equivalent cost for the trip is not available, private jets of the size used would typically cost more than £10,000 an hour between them.
The revelation underlines the importance of Harborne, one of the biggest donors in British political history, to Farage’s operation. This week it emerged that he donated a further £3m to Reform in the final quarter of 2025, following a record £9m donation last summer. The current generosity of the deeply private mega-donor is likely to renew calls for greater transparency in the sources of donations in British politics.
In the past, Farage has raised questions about the optics of donors providing funding to prominent political figures. When it was revealed that Keir Starmer had accepted more than £16,000 worth of work clothes from Labor peer Waheed Alli, he said: “It looks very bad for someone who said everything was going to change.”
The Financial Times reported last weekend that Harborne financed a ship from Thailand that undertook a five-day journey to take the group from Sri Lanka to the archipelago, and failed to get Farage to join the Chagossians.
The two planes are Dassault Falcons, owned by the British Virgin Islands company Black Panther Aviation. They are operated by a company called Sundance Operations, based in Guernsey, whose director has worked for Harborne aviation company AML Global, according to media reports, and for another of its companies, according to leaked overseas documents.
Sundance Operations, which operates a fleet of Dassault and Eclipse aircraft from a hangar in Bournemouth, was previously called Sherriff Aviation. Harborne has an international group called Sherriff Group of Companies.
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The two Dassault Falcon planes have recently made trips to Bangkok, where Harborne has business interests, and one of them has gone to Koh Samui, the island where he has a wellness retreat.
The size of Harborne’s donations to Reform has led campaign groups including Spotlight on Corruption and Transparency International to renew calls to limit political donations.
The businessman was previously one of the biggest donors in politics when he donated more than £10 million in tranches to Farage’s Brexit party to fund his 2019 election campaign. He later donated £1 million to Boris Johnson’s office after the former prime minister left Downing Street and accompanied him on a trip to Ukraine.
Farage also accepted £28,000 from Harborne to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Harborne, who began his career as a management consultant, lived in Thailand for about 20 years, where he is also known by the Thai name Chakrit Sakunkrit. He has a stake in defense technology company Qinetiq, as well as AML Global, an aviation fuel company.
Reform UK said funding for the trip to the Chagos Islands would be declared to the authorities in the usual way. Harborne did not respond to requests for comment.
