Arms and the £5m man: Farage megadonor Christopher Harborne’s military empire

But another element of Harborne’s business interests could prove still more consequential if it shapes Farage’s positions. There appears to be no precedent for a major UK donor who is so entwined with the military.

The Guardian’s ongoing investigation into the origins of Harborne’s riches and whether his donations inform Farage’s agenda has established the Thailand-based tycoon’s global web of commercial interests in the arms industry and military contracts. Among Harborne’s business collaborators are a striking number of former army officers, air force pilots, military officials and even, it seems, spies.

Described by his lawyers as an “intensely private” man, Harborne’s military interests reveal another side to the proprietor of a wellness sanctuary on a paradise island off Thailand.

A businessman who works with Harborne’s jet fuel venture describes it as a top supplier to US military operations worldwide, “strengthened by former US Department of Defense specialists and retired US military pilots, bringing decades of operational and strategic expertise to every mission”.

And Harborne is the biggest shareholder in what was once the research arm of the UK military, now a private company developing autonomous weapons.

At a moment when one of the biggest questions political leaders face is how much of the state’s resources to divert to military spending, Farage’s reliance on Harborne’s money presents a potential conflict of interest. Harborne has given Reform two-thirds of its funding, plus a £5m undeclared gift to Farage that the MPs’ watchdog is investigating.

Sam Power, a political funding expert at the University of Bristol, said: “It doesn’t necessarily follow that Reform will have policies that will benefit Harborne’s interests in the military-industrial complex. But it warrants a spotlight. It will be interesting if Reform’s policies start aligning with Christopher Harborne in this area as they have in cryptocurrency.”

Harborne’s lawyers at the London firm Schillings said: “The policies or positions Mr Farage may choose to adopt are a matter for Mr Farage and the Reform party. Our client’s commercial interests are unconnected in any way whatsoever with his political affiliations.”

Harborne’s military beginnings

After private school, Cambridge and stints at the McKinsey management consultancy and PepsiCo, Harborne moved to Thailand in the 1990s, made money in the markets, and set up on his own.

In 2006, he loaned £1.6m to a company called Subsea Resources, whose deep-sea operations were designed to salvage metal and artefacts from sunken shipwrecks and retrieve lost aircraft for governments. His loans “were made on an informal basis without legal documentation”, the company’s filing says, and he then exchanged them for shares, becoming a director in December 2006.

Subsea Resources only had five directors. Another, who joined on the same day as Harborne, was David Charters. His official filing said he was a Foreign Office veteran. That styling is frequently used for those who were, in fact, officers of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. A description of Charters at a security conference years later called him “a former MI6 intelligence officer”.

That was not Subsea Resources’ only apparent connection to the UK’s security apparatus. When Harborne gave up his board seat months later, his replacement was Tim McClement, a recently retired Royal Navy vice-admiral whose exploits included sinking the Belgrano while a submariner in the Falklands war.

Harborne was at the time setting up a venture of his own, AML Global, which has become a major military contractor. At the outset, there were connections to the armed forces, Thai corporate documents indicate. A fellow British director of a company that would go on to be part of AML Global, Arthur Napolitano, had proceeded from officer training at Sandhurst to the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. He later served in the Sultan of Oman’s land forces, a corporate biography says.

The new venture was close to Harborne’s heart. “Many of his business activities and investments flow from his passion for aviation,” say lawyers for Harborne, a licensed pilot who once crashed a light aircraft in residential Hampshire. AML Global is one of them. It brokers jet fuel, arranging for supplies to reach clients on whatever far-flung tarmac they wish to fill up their private jets.

AML sourced fuel in North America, Europe, Asia and Russia, according to a 2006 article in the industry press. It has, Harborne’s lawyers say, “grown into a worldwide leader in its industry with a comprehensive fuel supply network that maintains over 1,200 locations worldwide”. They add that AML Global no longer arranges the supply of jet fuel produced in Russia.

At first, the clients were civilians. In time, AML Global started to supply the organisation that consumes more fossil fuels than any other: the American military.

AML Global Pentagon contracts

The LinkedIn profile for Scott Elder, AML Global’s vice-president, records that he was a colonel in the US air force. Another entry on an earlier profile said he worked at the US embassy in Bangkok from 1996 (the year Harborne arrived) to 2011 (the year Harborne took Thai citizenship), and was a “host nation liaison” for the Pentagon.

Shortly after his time with the US government appears to have ended, Elder joined AML Global, and by the following year, 2013, AML Global was receiving Pentagon contracts for jet fuel. They started with $4,000 for a shipment to the Philippines and stayed small for years.

In 2017, Elder told his school alumni newsletter he had “decided to quit his day job and dedi