Principal Beneficiary?

Rowena Mason writes:

Nigel Farage’s newest billionaire donor was in business with a powerful Iranian religious foundation under the authority of the country’s supreme leader, raising questions about his past dealings with the hardline republic. Hossein Ghandehari, also called Sasan, was little known in the UK until he pledged to give millions to Reform UK this summer and donated £50,000 to Farage to cover the cost of two passes for the Davos World Economic Forum. He has said he is moving his tax residency from Switzerland to the UK in order to make “regular payments” of more than “one or two million” to the party.

The 61-year-old Iranian-born British businessman, who says he runs a $10bn (£7bn) fund called HP Trust, has declined to give details about how his family made its money beyond saying the fund owns assets in Europe and North America. Now, a French arbitration decision unearthed by the Guardian sheds some light on Ghandehari’s past dealings with Iranian state-linked entities between 2013 and 2016. It also reveals Ghandehari’s further Iranian business links to another Reform UK donor, John Richard Simpson, an administration professional and churchwarden from Potters Bar, north of London. Simpson’s design firm, Interior Architecture Landscape, counts the Ghandehari family as a client and gave £200,000 to Reform UK last year. Farage has been highly critical of Iran over the past year, and in March accused it of being a bigger danger to the UK than Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. 

The French judgment reveals that Ghandehari was the major investor behind a deal to supply and build a fibre-optic cable to carry telecoms traffic across Iran in a joint venture with a state-linked Iranian partner. The businessman’s HP Trust was the ultimate owner of Ori Group, which took a 49% stake in the venture, called Omran Razavi International Co, in 2015. The other 51% of the venture was owned by Astan Quds Razavi (AQR), a multibillion pound religious foundation in Iran’s second city of Mashhad. AQR’s leader at the time was ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi, who was appointed custodian of the foundation by the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, and served from the 1979 revolution until his death in 2016. Vaez Tabasi had been an ally of some reformers but remained close to the next supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and, according to the BBC, was reported by state media in 2009 to have said of opposition protest movements that those behind “sedition” in the country were “enemies of god” who deserved to be executed under sharia law.

The joint venture ended in about 2016, with the Ghandehari-backed entities being pushed out of the deal as a hardliner was appointed to replace Vaez Tabasi. The US imposed sanctions on AQR in 2021, saying it controlled “large swaths of the Iranian economy, including assets expropriated from political dissidents and religious minorities, to the benefit of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian government officials”. It describes it as a bonyad, one of the “opaque, quasi-official organisations generally controlled by current and former government officials and clerics that report directly to the supreme leader”. Ghandehari’s lawyers said it would be misleading to characterise him as “working with Iran” without the context that, after 2016, he was targeted by Iran’s supreme national security council with the false allegation that he was working with hostile western powers. They also said his involvement was intended to promote political change through greater access to information, which he believed was why the US and French authorities authorised the project. 

Tom Keatinge, the director of the Centre for Finance and Security at Rusi, the foreign affairs thinktank, said dealing with Iran “has always been a risky business as a financial institution because of this blurring between kind of state and the private sector. The private sector is not free to operate. It’s just very hard to operate in that country without touching a live rail.” He said there was clearly a range of positions among ayatollahs but it would be “pretty difficult to operate in an industry like telecoms” without the acceptance of the core leadership. The judgment also revealed that, until 2016, Ghandehari’s HP Trust was the owner of Orico General Trading LLC, which was contracted to supply telecoms equipment from France’s Alcatel-Lucent and transport it from Dubai to Iran. After 2016, this company was transferred to Simpson, the administration professional, who was responsible for winding down Orico’s operations and taking hundreds of staff out of the region.

Simpson told The Guardian he acquired the company after Iranian extremists took over AQR, when the project’s assets were seized and those involved faced political persecution on national security grounds, including accusations of working for hostile western governments. He said his plan was to wind down the business, adding that he carried out detailed checks before acquiring Orico. Ghandehari’s lawyers said AQR was independent and respected, and therefore the only viable choice for a joint venture in Iran. They said Ghandehari had never met Vaez Tabasi and that he did not regard him as an advocate for freedom or human rights but had believed him to be the only force in the Iranian hierarchy capable of holding back the hardliners in order for the project to go ahead.

The original contract for the deal was awarded to the Omran consortium in 2012 by the Iranian state-owned Telecommunication Infrastructure Company of Iran. According to Iranian corporate filings, Omran Razavi International Co also owned stakes in two majority state-owned banks, Bank Mellat and Bank Tejerat, in 2013. Both were subject to sanctions over involvement in Iran’s nuclear programme at that point. Ghandehari’s lawyers said Omran Razavi disposed of the small stakes in the banks before HP Trust’s Ori Group signed its agreement for a 49% stake in the venture in December 2014. They added that the deal was fully approved by authorities in France and the US.

In 2016, AQR took over the whole of the joint venture. Around the same time, the project’s chair, Mohammed Reza Noory, ended up in Iran’s infamous Evin prison, serving an 18-year sentence. Ghandehari and Noory are both named on leaked judicial papers published by the hacktivist group Edaalat Ali as having being under investigation in Iran after the deal collapsed. Ghandehari’s lawyers say he first became aware of the “bogus allegations” during French court proceedings and that the intelligence services had not given him any further details. Ghandehari’s representatives said fabricating financial and social cases against its targets to discredit them was part of the Iranian regime’s playbook and had been widely documented and recognised by western governments, human rights organisations and independent journalists. Ghandehari’s lawyers said he had not been to Iran for 30 years and his wealth had no connection to the country, since his ancestral property and assets were confiscated in 2016.

Farage has been highly critical of Iran’s government this year, supporting Donald Trump’s war against it, and attending a protest outside the Iranian embassy with pro-democracy activists in the spring. Last week he warned about Iranian agents entering the UK via small boats across the Channel. In a joint interview with Farage and Ghandehari in July, the Telegraph described Ghandehari’s business deal in Iran without mentioning its connections to Iranian regime-linked companies. It described it as a project to bring access to high-speed internet to Iran that would help drive reform, but that it later went wrong and resulted in Ghandehari’s assets being confiscated.

It is still not clear how Ghandehari and his family have built up their extraordinary wealth. His fortune is said to have gone from an estimated $2bn, when his late mother bought a property on London’s “billionaire’s row” in 2008, to a reported $10bn now. In a recent court case over a Picasso painting, Ghandehari was asked to provide proof that he could afford £1.5m in legal costs. His lawyers pointed only to a brochure from his Davos trip with Farage, with a description that he controls a trust with a “collective investment value in excess of $10bn”. At one point, he offered a letter from a “partner in a leading accountancy firm” confirming he was the principal beneficiary of HP Trust, and drawing an annual income from it. However, this was later withdrawn, as Ghandehari decided he did not want its contents to enter the public domain.

Indicators of Impairment

Anne Sacoolas, Jacob Wulfson, the illegal deployment of the United States Marines on our streets to extract a diplomat accused of the possession of child sexual abuse images, and now this. Rob Evans, Emine Sinmaz, Harry Davies and Louisa Loveluck write:

The US military failed to notify British police of an allegation that one of its airmen had been drink-driving in Suffolk, preventing the British authorities from being able to investigate the offence. The failure broke a longstanding formal agreement with British police that enables the UK to investigate alleged illegality by US military personnel who are stationed in Britain.

The airman, Christopher Mooty, had spent the night drinking with two other American service personnel in a market town before driving them to buy a kebab in the early hours of the morning. The allegation of drink-driving was later reported to his commanders, who then used their own internal processes to discipline him.

The case raises questions over how many other US military personnel based in the UK have committed crimes that have not been flagged to British police forces. Mooty went on to commit a second drink-driving offence a year later. This time he was prosecuted in a British court.

The latest disclosures are part of The Guardian’s investigation into crimes carried out by American military personnel who are based in Britain. The series prompted the UK government and police chiefs to set up a high-level inquiry in the summer to establish whether US military personnel stationed in Britain are being brought to justice properly.

In the latest case, Mooty, then a 21-year-old airman working at the huge United States Air Force (USAF) base at Mildenhall, Suffolk, went on a night out in March 2023. He met two other American airmen in a pub in Newmarket where he drank two or three bottles of beer in two hours, according to evidence heard at his disciplinary hearing. They then went to another Newmarket pub where he had two or three vodka Red Bulls over another two hours. They took a taxi to the home of one of the men in Bury St Edmunds. But they soon decided they were hungry and at around 4am Mooty drove them in his car to a kebab shop, according to evidence at the disciplinary hearing.

While he was driving, Mooty received messages from a British woman who had been in a relationship with him. During the exchanges, the woman quickly suspected that he was drunk. Later that night, he went to her home. She said that Mooty was “the most drunk I’ve ever seen him” when he went to her house, adding: “I’m surprised he didn’t crash/get caught,” the disciplinary hearing heard. She reported him to his superiors at Mildenhall. “He is endangering the lives of the people in this country and should not be here,” she told them.

Mooty was disciplined in a US court martial for being drunk in charge of a vehicle. A military judge convicted him, sentencing him to 20 days of hard labour and a demotion. However, under the terms of an agreement that has been in force since the 1950s, the British police have the primary responsibility for investigating alleged wrongdoing by US military personnel, unless the offences were committed while the Americans were on duty, or against another member of their armed forces or property.

There are now questions about why the US military prevented the possibility of Mooty being prosecuted in a British court. Suffolk police said they were “not notified of a drink-driving incident on 3/4 March 2023 involving a US airman from RAF Mildenhall. We understand that the incident was investigated and dealt with by the USAF.” In a statement, the USAF said: “While we do not have a specific written record of this notification occurring, there is no reason to believe that verbal notification was not provided in line with standard inter-agency coordination procedures.”

Asked why it decided to investigate Mooty instead of handing the case over to the British police, the USAF said he “was not stopped by UK law enforcement while driving. Rather, the allegation was first reported to US military authorities well after the driving incident occurred. Thus, no chemical testing (blood and breathalyser evidence) was available nor any first-hand observation of impairment by police forces, as typically desired by local UK prosecutors.” The USAF added that its military prosecutors could take Mooty to a court martial based on the testimony of witnesses and what it called “indicators of impairment”. 

The USAF said it had a policy of prosecuting as many of its personnel as possible within the boundaries of its agreement with the UK. It argues that this is a more effective way of maintaining discipline and good order within its ranks. The USAF asks British police if it can take over the prosecution of cases, requests that British police often agree to. US military judges subsequently quashed the court martial verdict against Mooty and approved a rehearing of his case, but this has not been held, as he was dismissed from the USAF after he was caught drink-driving a year later. 

At 4.20am on 31 March 2024, he was arrested by a Suffolk police officer after driving a car while over the limit in Bury St Edmunds. He resisted being arrested. He was convicted at Ipswich magistrates court in August 2024 after pleading guilty to both offences. Mooty was banned from driving for a year and ordered to pay fines and penalties totalling £871. On this occasion, the USAF did not step in and request to take over the prosecution. It said it left it to the British police as it “understood prosecution of the case by local authorities to be perfectly appropriate” under the agreement with the UK. The USAF communicated with British prosecutors over the second drink-driving offence. It said it helped the British authorities gain access to another member of the US air force who rebutted Mooty’s defence that he was not driving that night.

The conduct of American military personnel driving on British roads is contentious, as there has been a history of them committing offences such as speeding, drink-driving and driving without insurance. In one well-known case, it took a long campaign to bring to justice Anne Sacoolas, the American intelligence official who killed a 19-year-old motorcyclist, Harry Dunn, in a road accident outside a US base in Northamptonshire in 2019.

Bounce Back

Rioters in France should call in their defence Lucy Connolly, and the Nigel Farage who had her as a party conference platform speaker.

Looters in France should call in their defence the suspended Labour MPs Bayo Alaba and Perran Moon, who tried to wind up their companies without having repaid their Bounce Back Loans.

Kashim Chowdhury should call in his defence James Orr, who was simultaneously the full-time Head of Policy for the Short Money-funded Reform UK, and a full-time Associate Professor in the directly publicly funded Faculty of Divinity of the University of Cambridge.

And Queers for Palestine, where homosexual activity between consenting adults in private is fully legal in the West Bank even if such acts between men are punishable by 10 years' imprisonment in the Gaza Strip (though not by death, contrary to Internet falsehood), should call in their defence Wes Streeting, who has deployed RAF Typhoon fighter jets in the service of Saudi Arabia, where both male and female homosexual acts do indeed incur capital punishment.

Political and Digital Strategy

Lest we who had endured only what Andy Burnham and David Bell called “general racism” formed ideas above our station, successive Ministers have dropped “I know something you don’t know” hints about the proscription of Palestine Action. Whatever that something may be, we can no longer doubt that it was worse than conspiring with the Ulster Volunteer Force to arrange contract killings, since there has been no proscription of Turning Point UK, of the Bow Group, of the United Kingdom Independence Party, or indeed of the Conservative Party, despite what Ben Quinn and Henry Dyer write:

A former Conservative election candidate has been suspended from the party after he was seemingly filmed discussing the cost of hiring contract killers and offering to “broker” the services of a far-right activist with alleged paramilitary links. Jack Ross was filmed apparently asking an undercover reporter “What do you want done?” before listing the type of violent options that could be bought. Ross appeared to tell the Al Jazeera journalist: “They can just kick the fuck out of someone. That’s a certain amount. They can start cutting people’s faces up, that’s another amount. And they can stab someone. They can shoot someone. They can kill someone.”

Police in Scotland say they will be reviewing and assessing the Al Jazeera documentary – Contract Killers and the Far Right – for any criminality. Ross is the chief executive of Turning Point UK, a spin-off from the campaign group founded by the murdered US Republican commentator Charlie Kirk. Footage released by TPUK last year showed Ross and others from the group meeting Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, after Kirk’s death. A profile page for Ross on the website of the Bow Group, a Conservative thinktank that lists him as a research fellow, states he has advised MPs and candidates on political and digital strategy. He has been pictured alongside Boris Johnson and other high-profile figures including James Cleverly, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liam Fox.

Ross was reported by Al Jazeera to have introduced an undercover reporter to a violent criminal from Glasgow with links to the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, who offers to have people killed for money. Al Jazeera approached Ross with a fictitious family problem where a deceased uncle’s business was at risk of being taken over by a gang, whose members were supposedly warned they would “get fucked” if anything happened. Ross replied to this: “Yeah, you have to deliver on that as well. You’ve got to explain to me what’s needed … I can then go and broker from there. But I’ve got to say, even to myself … if there’s lashback I’ve got to keep my name out of it.”  The Scottish paramilitary contact was then filmed at a London hotel offering to arrange different types of killings, ranging from a hit-and-run that could be made to look like drink-driving to a stabbing.

The meeting took place after Ross, apparently acting on behalf of the Zimbabwean government, had reportedly paid thousands of pounds to the Glasgow activist to organise a fake political rally in support of lifting UK sanctions imposed on the African country. Ross said: “I have had a few things and some of the Zims [Zimbabweans] have said to me they want stuff done. They wanted a fucking shooter.” He said he had asked them to talk to the paramilitary, adding: “I said I was not putting fucking prints on anything.” While TPUK was launched as a student movement, it has become increasingly involved in anti-migrant street protests. Its chief operating officer is Nick Tenconi, the leader of the far-right UK Independence party, who visited the Conservative conference in 2022 with Ross.

Ross was filmed in 2022 telling an undercover reporter they should chat to him about what they wanted, adding “keep it simple” and then listing the various violent options that could be bought for cash, including murder. A Conservative party spokesperson said: “Mr Ross’s membership of the Conservative party has been suspended with immediate effect pending an investigation. We cannot comment further while the investigation is ongoing.” At another point, Ross expressed concerns that journalists could be recording the sort of things he was saying and could pass them to police.

“The journalist will put it out there and then the police will pick it up and fuck you,” he said. “You’ve got to think that what we were talking about and had someone film it we’d be fucking done for conspiracy.” Tenconi was filmed alongside Ross as they outlined a plan to use football hooligans to stir up trouble. Tenconi said: “So let Labour get in. So we build the new right and we have these armies … so, three-pronged. We keep winning MPs over. Then we build the second prong, we build an army, and that’s street demos, protest, just fuck things up, basically.” 

A Police Scotland spokesperson said: “We’re aware of the documentary. It will be reviewed and assessed for any criminality.” Al Jazeera reported that Ross had “completely” denied its investigation’s findings, claiming that everything he said to the undercover reporter was not meant seriously. Ross, who was a local elections candidate for the Conservatives, was approached by The Guardian for comment through TPUK. Tenconi was also approached for comment via his party.

Saved By The Bell?

The first black woman ever elected to the House of Commons is now its longest-serving female member. But the Labour Party has suspended her twice for having pointed out that it was operating a hierarchy of racism. Yet the Labour Government has just adopted a 27-point plan to give effect to its acceptance of the specialness and superiority of antisemitism, itself defined in line with the infamous IHRA Definition while violating it by conflating Jews with Israel. We thought that we had got rid of Keir Starmer, who commissioned Sir David Bell to produce this nonsense to order for internal Labour factional reasons, but we should have been so lucky.

Considering how much else has happened in human history, or even just how much else happened during the Second World War, then how much more teaching of the Holocaust could anyone possibly want, since presumably the call is not for the inclusion of, for example, the experience of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people, whose children remain the worst treated on ethnic grounds by the education system?

If you polled black or Asian pupils about being victims of racism at school, then you would not find two in five who said that they never had been. You would not find one. I do not mean one in five. I do not mean one per cent. You would not find one person. Yet as when three non-fatal stabbings led to a COBRA meeting because two of the three victims were Jewish, this is somehow a national emergency while the far bigger problem is just life, suck it up, get on with it. And 60 per cent of Jewish schoolchildren supposedly experience antisemitism at school, while it is not in dispute that only 30 per cent of them do not go to Jewish schools. Take as long as you need.

Lasting Impact

Excellent news about Jackdaw. Now, on to Rosebank, while even the Green Party has dropped its opposition to nuclear power. The time will come when everyone will pretend always to have been in favour of the all-of-the-above energy policy. In the meantime, though, some old wrongs still need to be righted, as Grace Shaw writes:

People with a connection to the 1984 Battle of Orgreave are invited to attend community listening events to help the public inquiry into the dispute "understand its lasting impact". Violence broke out between police officers and miners outside the Orgreave coking plant in Rotherham on 18 June 1984, in one of the pivotal moments of the 1984–85 miners' strike. 

The independent Orgreave Inquiry, announced by the government in July 2025, will examine planning around the policing of the demonstration, events on the day itself and charging decisions following the arrests made. Anyone connected to the incident is invited to attend listening events in Barnsley on 28 October and Durham on 12 November. 

Orgreave Inquiry chair the Rt Revd Dr Pete Wilcox, Bishop of Sheffield, said: "The events at Orgreave affected many people in different ways, and those experiences continue to resonate more than 40 years on. We want to ensure that those voices are heard and understood. Whether you would like to share your own story, listen to others, ask questions about our work or simply find out more about the inquiry, I warmly encourage you to register and join us."

The events at Orgreave took place during the miners' strike which was sparked after the National Coal Board announced in March 1984 that it was shutting 20 UK collieries it said were unprofitable, resulting in the loss of at least 20,000 jobs. More than three quarters of the country's 187,000 miners went on strike in response to the announcement.

The Orgreave Inquiry organisers said the events were about listening and conversation and were not a formal evidence-gathering exercise. Stories heard will support the chair and panel's investigation into the events. The events will take place at the National Union of Mineworkers offices on Huddersfield Road in Barnsley on 28 October, and at Redhills Durham Miners Hall on Flass St on 12 November. Both will run from 10:00-17:00 GMT.

Justice must be served so that we can move on from the situation in which no energy price cap could meaningfully be said to exist, since it kept being put up, while the standing charges on gas and electricity were 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they were supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only had they repeatedly failed to do so, but they had never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. As ever, someone is getting paid. And as ever, it is not us.

Hoyle’s War

My late grandmother, herself a former Member of the Legislative Council, absolutely loved Sir Lindsay Hoyle when he visited Saint Helena in February 2024. She was once required to leave the chamber because she had refused to withdraw her description of another member as “a liar”, so she would have known exactly what to do about the Ministers of whom Robert Hutton writes:

“It is shameful!” Lindsay Hoyle was furious. Spitting mad. Splenetic. His rag? It was lost. The minister’s arse? He was getting medieval on it. “It is appalling treatment!” The Speaker of the Commons likes to have his statements prepared in advance, and he was clutching pages of notes laying bare his immense displeasure, like an incensed driver who has finally got to the front of the queue to complain about an unjust parking fine. At any moment, it seemed he might reach down and start pulling supporting evidence from a Sainsbury’s Bag for Life.

The specific cause of his anger was the government’s screeching u-turn on using gas from the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. Not the decision itself –— others were dealing with that — but the fact that it had been reported everywhere before being announced in Parliament. Hoyle has for years been fighting to get ministers to stop doing this, without any noticeable effect. Now he was both mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Making him madder was the fact that the Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, had bravely decided to send an underling, Michael Shanks, to make the announcement and take the heat. She was in Aberdeen, speaking to broadcasters, although it’s entirely possible she could still hear Hoyle at that distance.

“I’m sorry that Sky News is more important, rather than the members,” the Speaker said, gesturing around him. Was his point undermined by the sight of MPs fleeing in search of lunch? Not a bit of it. “This issue has been of great interest to the House!” That is certainly true. It’s a bruise that the Conservatives have been punching for months, aware that Fahnbulleh’s predecessor, Ed Miliband, didn’t want to grant the license and that Keir Starmer didn’t know what he wanted. Wednesday’s announcement can be seen as a basic marker of competence by Andy Burnham’s administration. Whatever the merits of the argument, dragging it out was only hurting.

The prime minister had earlier tried to make the best of the u-turn. Kemi Badenoch had arrived triumphant, ever more certain that everything that happens is evidence of her brilliance. “The Conservatives first approved Jackdaw in 2022!” she announced. That gave Burnham an opening: “We have made a decision that her government messed up. There was a delay because they didn’t do the process properly.”

The Tory leader sneered at this as Starmerism redux, and who can doubt that a Badenoch administration would indeed charge around announcing things before seeing them overturned in the courts? Badenoch’s big advantage was that Burnham had, when all was said and done, accepted her arguments. “The gas would still be needed,” he told the Greens’ Ellie Chowns, while the Tory frontbench waved their arms to point out that this was what they’d been saying for months. “It would just be imported from somewhere else.” 

Both leaders are still feeling each other out, trying to work out how to characterise the other. The Tory leader had a reply when Burham trumpeted his social care policy as an example of a big decision: “Talking about it is not making a decision.” Meanwhile, after getting into trouble for speaking off the cuff in the past, the prime minister was more careful this week, keeping his folder of notes open to remind him of prepared lines and facts and figures. He’s developed a tactic of looking for areas where he can agree with Badenoch, emphasising his essential congeniality. Only in his final question did he refer to Liz Truss’s forthcoming book about how she was done over by a conspiracy involving the Bank of England, the Freemasons and aliens from the planet Mars. 

Speaking of people who don’t know when to stay quiet, at much the same time, Reform’s Zia Yusuf released a video rant showing how intensely unconcerned the party is by recent reporting of the views of its members. It’s best summarised as “You can’t expose us, we’re exposing YOU!” After threats to set the police on ITV, and complaints about the hurt feelings of Reform’s loyal army of snowflakes, it finished with a promise to blow the party’s donor bounty on court cases against any journalist who makes Yusuf cry. It’s highly entertaining, and I recommend it to anyone who needs cheering up. Perhaps the Speaker should take a look. He was still fuming when we left him, seconds away from turning green and smashing up the chamber. “It is simply not good enough!” he stormed. “I thought this was a new beginning!” It may be, but nothing will stop governments from trailing announcements to the press. We’ll be seeing Angry Hoyle again.