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A British billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate money-laundering controls on his cryptocurrency business is funding a political base in the heart of Westminster used by “anti-woke” and rightwing activists.
Ben Delo, 42, who was pardoned by Donald Trump last year, has given support in kind to Rupert Lowe, the anti-migration MP challenging Nigel Farage from the right – while also connecting with mainstream figures including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and former cabinet minister Michael Gove.
Delo, an Oxford graduate who moved to Hong Kong in 2012 and appears to still be based there, says he is a champion of “free speech” and has vowed to tackle the “nuisance” of political correctness. He supports more than 50 organisations ranging across the political spectrum and public life, as well as non-affiliated groups and individuals.
Now a joint investigation by the Guardian and Hope Not Hate reveals some of the people and projects that have benefited from Delo’s largesse.
Among them are those who have expressed hardline positions on immigration, nationalism and abortion.
Delo, who says he has poured more than £100m into philanthropy, is providing funding, networking opportunities and help in kind via a suite of rooms in a building overlooking Westminster Abbey, known as the Sanctuary. Those given access can use the facility free of charge for events, office space and podcasting.
Restore Britain, the party founded by Lowe, a former Reform UK MP who now sits as an independent, launched its campaign for the mass deportation of millions of migrants from a room at the Sanctuary last year.
The Triggernometry podcast, which describes itself as a free speech and open inquiry platform, has used the facilities to broadcast to its 1.7 million subscribers.
Its co-host Konstantin Kisin has questioned whether the British-born former prime minister Rishi Sunak could be considered English because of his ethnicity, saying during a show recorded at the Sanctuary: “He’s a brown Hindu, how is he English?”
A spokesperson for Triggernometry said Kisin had “repeatedly explained that he is not rightwing and not only that, he never said Rishi Sunak was not English”. They added: “He said that, in his view, like his own son, who was born to two first-generation Brits in Britain, he was British and not ethnically English.”
Delo says he doesn’t necessarily endorse the views of those he supports. But he facilitates events where those with hardline views mix with more mainstream politicians. Guests at his summer party last year included the former cabinet minister Michael Gove, Reform UK’s head of policy – the Cambridge academic and anti-abortionist James Orr – and Ben Habib, the founder of Advance UK, the political party supported by Tommy Robinson.
Delo has also connected with Badenoch. The leader of the Conservative party sat at a table with him at the Spectator magazine awards dinner in 2023.
Later, Badenoch sent Delo a handwritten note on a card featuring parliament’s portcullis logo, saying: “Was great to party with you last month. We should do so more often”.
One of Delo’s associates, Jeremy Hildreth, a branding consultant who has been described as his chief of staff, donated £26,755 in legal costs to Badenoch in 2021 related to advice on online harassment, abuse and intimidation.
The billionaire’s lawyers told the Guardian he provided space for those with diverse views to express them, and financial support to a broad range of organisations, many of which had conflicting views. This did not mean he endorsed the opinions of each, they said.
They said Hildreth had provided “family office services” to Delo for some time. His company, Jeremy Hildreth And Comrades Ltd, operates from the Sanctuary.
Delo was convicted in the US in 2022 after pleading guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by wilfully failing to implement money-laundering controls at BitMEX, the trillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange he co-founded.
US court documents examined by the Guardian show prosecutors alleged the company was “in effect a money-laundering platform” because of the failures to establish the required anti-money-laundering controls on trading.
Delo’s lawyers said there had been no evidence or findings of the company being used for money-laundering purposes and the prosecutor’s assertions were never tested by the court.
Having pledged to give away at least half of his wealth, Delo says he has poured more than £100m into philanthropy. There is limited information in the public domain about how the billionaire distributes his money or the full range of causes he supports.
While some beneficiaries cite an organisation called the Ben Delo Foundation as their benefactor, no charity or company of that name is registered in the UK. The foundation is referenced on a website at delo.org, but the website does not publish accounts, or name any trustees.
Lawyers for Delo said his philanthropic activities were administered through a donor-advised fund at a UK charity provider and that its activities were set out on its website.
After the Guardian approached Delo for comment, the website was updated to include more information about his background, while Delo announced a further £45m in donations to a maths institute and an education charity he founded supporting autistic children.
Using documents seen by the Guardian and Hope Not Hate, anonymous interviews and social media analysis, this investigation reveals for the first time the extent to which the billionaire has been building up his presence in Westminster.
Parties and a pardon
Beneath a gothic stone arch, next to Westminster Abbey, the entrance to Delo’s offices offers no clues as to who might be occupying the second floor of the Grade II-listed building. His name does not appear on the brass plate outside, nor on a sign in the lobby. Visitors have been asked not to take photographs or refer to the facility on social media, sources say.
Inside, the venue has all the trappings of a gentleman’s club. Light flows through ceiling-high windows into a tapestry room, a turret room and a common room, where the drinks cabinet is stocked with Moët champagne and Sipsmith gin.
In pride of place in the hallway is a framed copy of Delo’s presidential pardon, signed by Trump in March last year.
It was here in September 2022 that Delo hosted his friend Jordan Peterson, a Canadian academic known as a culture warrior with reactionary views on feminism. The pair, he has said, camped out in the office the night before the late queen’s funeral for a bird’s-eye view of the cortege.
Inside, the talk is about the need to change the “ecosystem”, the Guardian understands, with Delo intent on influencing politics, academia and wider civic society under the banner of free speech.
Some of the organisations that have used the Sanctuary hold conflicting views. There are many, however, with a strong focus on immigration, anti-wokeness and populism.
In something of a manifesto, Delo outlined his agenda in 2024 at the Battle of Ideas conference, run by his friend, the independent peer and Brexit campaigner Claire Fox.
He said: “About a decade ago, I moved to Hong Kong … When I left Britain, something we used to call political correctness was very much a clear and present nuisance.
“It was a pain in the neck, and it made me wince. But it hardly seemed like an existential threat to western civilisation. Yet, in the intervening years, we’ve seen political correctness metastasise into a totalising ideology that’s actually strangling our societies. And quite frankly, I’ve had enough of it.”
Each year, within the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, Delo hosts an eclectic mix of hundreds of guests at a lavish summer party. Photos taken at last year’s event show charity executives mingling with broadcasters and political activists.
Circulating among the trays of champagne on midsummer’s eve last June, with the medieval arches illuminated in red, white and blue, were a handful of mainstream political figures – among them Michael Gove, the former Tory cabinet minister, now editor of the Spectator, who told the Guardian he was “proud to know” Delo and had “huge respect” for his philanthropic work and championing of maths education.
In a social media post, one guest described the party as “an evening of joy, freedom and quiet revolution”.
Also there was Maurice Glasman, a Labour peer and founder of the socially conservative Blue Labour movement, who has promoted a tough stance on immigration and crime, telling GB News last year shoplifters should be punished by “bringing back the stocks, pelting them with rotten fruit”.
Other guests included Habib, a former deputy leader of Reform UK, who left to form the rightwing political party Advance UK last year, which subsequently received the backing of Tommy Robinson. Habib drew fire in 2024 for suggesting migrants who “scupper” their boats while crossing the Channel should be left to “suffer the consequences of their actions”.
Farage loyalists from Reform UK were also at the gathering: Matt Goodwin, who contested the Gorton and Denton byelection and has claimed that UK-born people from minority ethnic backgrounds are not necessarily British, and Orr, who is close to the US vice-president, JD Vance.
Another guest was Paul Coleman, the director of the UK branch of the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which played a central role in overturning Roe v Wade, the legislation that protected the right to abortion across the US. In the UK, Coleman has overseen an increase in activity and spending by ADF, which has supported legal challenges to the buffer zones designed to protect women from harassment outside abortion clinics.
Coleman told the Guardian via ADF he had “enjoyed attending Mr Delo’s summer party alongside hundreds of others” and described his group as a “Christian legal advocacy organisation” that defended fundamental freedoms, with its work in the UK involving “support for clients who have been criminalised merely for silently praying or offering consensual conversation in censorial buffer zones”.
After the event, a select group made their way back to the Sanctuary for the after-party. Here, the billionaire was lifted up by friends so that he could pull down a ceiling lamp, amid cheers of approval from onlookers.
‘Our free speech hero’
Within his offices Delo provides free meeting rooms, catering and video and audio production facilities for podcasting and broadcasting by different organisations, including a number billing themselves as “free speech” advocates.
They include the Triggernometry podcast, whose guests tend to hail from the right: Robinson, Farage, Peterson and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have all been interviewed. The lineup has also featured apolitical figures such as the actor Stephen Fry, as well as the far-left politician George Galloway.
When Triggernometry interviewed Badenoch in 2025, the recording took place at the Sanctuary.
A spokesperson for Triggernometry said the show was not politically affiliated or rightwing, and that it was “delighted to count [Delo] among the tens of thousands of people who make our show possible”.
Courage Media, which describes itself as a platform for open and fearless dialogue, also records its podcasts in the building. One of its leading contributors, Connor Tomlinson, who is a supporter of Lowe’s Restore Britain, has called for the mass incarceration of immigrants and the “remigration” of some British-born people from ethnic minorities, and expressed support for the death penalty.
Lowe, who announced in February that Restore Britain had been registered as a political party, was provided with free office space to hold a press conference announcing “the most comprehensive deportation policy ever produced in Britain” in the tapestry room last November.
Boris Johnson’s former aide Munira Mirza is among the more mainstream figures using the Sanctuary offices, hosting events there for her group, Civic Futures, which describes istelf as a “talent pipeline” for people entering public life.
In the Sanctuary offices a framed picture of Delo, a gift from the Academy of Ideas, founded by Claire Fox, contains a written thank you to “our free speech hero”. The Academy uses one of the rooms as an office, and the Guardian understands Delo has provided £100,000 a year to fund Fox’s Battle of Ideas festival, which holds debates tackling the “free speech emergency” and “cancel culture”. Its marketing material credits the Ben Delo Foundation as a supporter.
In a recent interview, Delo revealed he has also helped fund the Free Speech Union (FSU), run by the Tory peer Toby Young, which has funded legal action against universities and other employers, and describes itself as a public interest body supporting free speech. The FSU went to court recently to stop an activist group publishing a list of its donors after the hacking of its website.
Neither Fox nor Young responded to a request for comment.
From conviction to ‘blip’
Delo sees himself as a disrupter. He has spoken about how, as a child, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s, now defined as part of the autism spectrum, and was kicked out of several primary schools. He has also described how he was almost sent down from Oxford University for internet piracy.
Laws and rules that restrict any form of speech are, he believes, “a kind of authoritarianism and policing of opinions and policing of thought”.
After university, where he was awarded a double first in maths and computer science, he worked as a software engineer, and later joined the bank JP Morgan in Hong Kong. In 2014, he co-founded BitMEX with two partners. Within four years, the three entrepreneurs were at the controls of a platform that allowed its users to anonymously transact trillions of dollars.
Incorporated in Seychelles, but with offices in New York, BitMEX grew to become one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world and made Delo and his fellow founders millions.
At one point in 2018, Delo and his partners were pictured getting out of three brightly coloured Lamborghinis outside a crypto conference in New York, in a marketing stunt. But the crypto platform’s success was drawing the attention of the US authorities, and surfacing repeatedly in criminal investigations, according to US court documents.
In October 2020 Delo was charged by the US attorney for the southern district of New York with violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) by wilfully failing to establish, implement and maintain an anti-money-laundering programme at BitMEX. He pleaded guilty in February 2022 and agreed to pay a $10m civil fine in a settlement with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In June 2022 he was sentenced in a federal court in New York to 30 months’ probation.
BitMex also entered a guilty plea to the same charge at a later date and was sentenced to a $100m criminal fine in January 2025. Trump pardoned the company two months later, meaning the criminal fine was no longer payable.
At Delo’s sentencing the court was told the company did not dispute the conclusion of the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network that more than $200m in suspicious transactions had been conducted on the platform “directly related to its failure, knowing and willful failure to implement” an anti-money laundering programme”.
Delo’s lawyers told the court the billionaire “candidly” admitted violating the BSA. But they said the government had sought to overstate the seriousness of the offence.
Delo, they said, was most concerned with how the case would affect his philanthropic goals to use “his newfound wealth from founding BitMEX … to effect real change in the world for the benefit of all”.
The US prosecutor said: “The fact that the defendant was able to give millions of dollars to charity no doubt resulted in large part from the fact he personally received [amount redacted] in dividends from BitMEX, while the company systematically flouted [US law] for a period of five years.”
Delo said through his lawyers the prosecutor’s statements were without foundation, were deliberately partisan and did not form part of the court’s findings.
In March of last year, Delo was one of a handful of crypto entrepreneurs to be granted a “full and unconditional pardon”. He now describes his 2022 conviction as a “non-crime”, and a “blip running a startup”.
A PR strategy, drawn up some years ago for managing the rehabilitation of Delo’s reputation, positioned him as a leading British philanthropist dedicated to tackling cancel culture.
It states it can be put into effect only once the “dust has settled” on his US conviction. It appears that moment may now have arrived.
