Reform UK donor's Iran ties: billionaire Ghandehari linked to joint venture with Iranian religious foundation

A French arbitration decision, unearthed by the Guardian, has put new detail on the business past of Nigel Farage's newest billionaire donor. It shows that between 2013 and 2016, Hossein Ghandehari, who is also known as Sasan, was the major investor in an Iranian telecoms venture whose majority owner was a religious foundation under the authority of Iran's supreme leader.

Ghandehari was little known in Britain until this summer, when he pledged millions to Reform UK and gave Farage £50,000 to pay for two passes to the Davos World Economic Forum. He has said he is moving his tax residency from Switzerland to the UK so he can make regular payments to the party of more than one or two million. He is 61, Iranian-born and British, and says he runs a $10bn (£7bn) fund called HP Trust. He has declined to say how his family made its money beyond saying the fund holds assets in Europe and North America.

The judgment describes a deal to supply and build a fibre-optic cable carrying telecoms traffic across Iran. The contract was awarded in 2012 to the Omran consortium by the state-owned Telecommunication Infrastructure Company of Iran. HP Trust was the ultimate owner of Ori Group, which took a 49% stake in the joint venture, Omran Razavi International Co, in 2015. The other 51% belonged to Astan Quds Razavi, or AQR, a multibillion-pound foundation in Mashhad, Iran's second city.

AQR's leader at the time was ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi, appointed custodian by Ruhollah Khomeini and in post from the 1979 revolution until his death in 2016. He had been an ally of some reformers but stayed close to Ali Khamenei. According to the BBC, state media reported in 2009 that he described those behind opposition protest "sedition" as "enemies of god" who deserved execution under sharia law. The US sanctioned AQR in 2021, describing a bonyad, an opaque quasi-official body reporting to the supreme leader, that controlled large parts of the Iranian economy, including assets taken from dissidents and religious minorities. Iranian filings also show that in 2013 Omran Razavi held stakes in two majority state-owned banks, Bank Mellat and Bank Tejerat, both then sanctioned over Iran's nuclear programme.

Ghandehari's lawyers say Omran Razavi sold those small bank stakes before Ori signed its agreement in December 2014, and that authorities in France and the US approved the deal. They say it would mislead to describe him as working with Iran without noting that after 2016 Iran's supreme national security council falsely accused him of working with hostile western powers. They say he saw the project as a way to promote political change through wider access to information, that he never met Vaez Tabasi, and that he did not regard him as a human rights advocate but as the one figure able to hold back hardliners so the project could proceed. They also say AQR was independent and respected, and so the only viable partner.

Tom Keatinge of the Rusi thinktank said dealing with Iran has always been risky for financial institutions because the line between state and private sector blurs, and that it is very hard to operate there without touching a live rail. He said it would be pretty difficult to work in telecoms without the acceptance of the core leadership.

The venture ended around 2016, when a hardliner replaced Vaez Tabasi and the Ghandehari-backed entities were pushed out. AQR took over the whole venture. Around then the project's chair, Mohammed Reza Noory, ended up in Evin prison serving an 18-year sentence. Leaked judicial papers published by the hacktivist group Edaalat Ali name both men as under investigation in Iran after the collapse. Ghandehari's lawyers say he learned of the "bogus allegations" in French court proceedings, and that fabricating cases to discredit targets is a documented regime tactic. They also say he has not visited Iran for 30 years and that his ancestral property and assets were confiscated in 2016.

The judgment also links a second Reform donor. Until 2016 HP Trust owned Orico General Trading LLC, contracted to move Alcatel-Lucent telecoms equipment from Dubai to Iran. Orico then passed to John Richard Simpson, a church warden from Potters Bar whose design firm, Interior Architecture Landscape, counts the Ghandehari family as a client and gave Reform £200,000 last year. Simpson says he bought it after extremists took over AQR and seized the project's assets, that he did detailed checks, and that he wound the business down and took hundreds of staff out of the region.

The revelations sit awkwardly beside Farage's recent stance. In March he called Iran a bigger danger to the UK than Putin, he has backed Donald Trump's war against it, joined a protest at the Iranian embassy, and last week warned of Iranian agents arriving by small boat. The Telegraph's July joint interview described the Iran project as a push for high-speed internet and reform, without mentioning the regime-linked partners.

The origin of the wealth remains unclear. His fortune reportedly rose from about $2bn, when his late mother bought a property on London's "billionaire's row" in 2008, to $10bn now. In a Picasso court case, asked to prove he could afford £1.5m in costs, his lawyers offered only a Davos brochure, and later withdrew an accountant's letter confirming he benefits from HP Trust. Questions about the donations and their source look set to continue.