Hossein Ghandehari, also called Sasan, was little known in the UK until he pledged 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. The 61-year-old Iranian-born British businessman, who says he runs a $10bn fund called HP Trust, has said he is moving his tax residency from Switzerland to the UK to make "regular payments" of more than "one or two million" to the party.
A French arbitration decision unearthed by the Guardian reveals that between 2013 and 2016 Ghandehari was the major investor behind a deal to supply and build a fibre-optic cable to carry telecoms traffic across Iran. His HP Trust was the ultimate owner of Ori Group, which took a 49% stake in the venture, Omran Razavi International Co, in 2015. The other 51% was owned by Astan Quds Razavi (AQR), a multibillion pound religious foundation in the Iranian city of Mashhad whose custodian, ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi, was appointed by Ruhollah Khomeini and served until his death in 2016.
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 described AQR 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. His involvement, they said, was intended to promote political change through greater access to information, which he believed was why US and French authorities authorised the project. The joint venture ended in about 2016, when Ghandehari-backed entities were pushed out as a hardliner replaced Vaez Tabasi. The project's chair, Mohammed Reza Noory, ended up in Iran's Evin prison serving an 18-year sentence, and both he and Ghandehari are named on leaked judicial papers as having been under investigation after the deal collapsed.
Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Finance and Security at Rusi, 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 it would be "pretty difficult to operate in an industry like telecoms" without the acceptance of the core leadership.
Until 2016, HP Trust also owned Orico General Trading LLC, which was contracted to supply telecoms equipment from France's Alcatel-Lucent and transport it from Dubai to Iran. The company was then transferred to John Richard Simpson, an administration professional and church warden from Potters Bar whose design firm gave £200,000 to Reform UK last year. 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. He said his plan was to wind down the business and that he carried out detailed checks before acquiring Orico.
Farage has been highly critical of Iran this year, accusing it in March of being a bigger danger to the UK than Vladimir Putin, supporting Donald Trump's war against the country, and attending a protest outside the Iranian embassy in the spring. Last week he warned about Iranian agents entering the UK via small boats. A joint interview with Farage and Ghandehari published in the Telegraph in July described the business deal without mentioning its connections to regime-linked companies.