Reform UK donor's past Iran business ties to regime-linked foundation come to light

A billionaire who has become one of Reform UK's newest major donors was previously in business with a powerful Iranian religious foundation that answers to the country's supreme leader, according to a French arbitration decision uncovered by the Guardian.

Hossein Ghandehari, also known as Sasan, was little known in Britain until this summer, when he pledged millions to Nigel Farage's party and gave £50,000 to Farage to pay for two passes to the World Economic Forum in Davos. The 61-year-old Iranian-born British businessman says he is moving his tax residency from Switzerland to the UK so he can make regular payments to Reform of more than "one or two million". He says he runs a $10bn (£7bn) fund called HP Trust, but has not explained how his family made its money beyond saying the fund holds assets in Europe and North America.

The ruling sheds light on his dealings with Iranian state-linked entities between 2013 and 2016. It shows he was the main investor behind a project to supply and build a fibre-optic cable carrying telecoms traffic across 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 remaining 51% belonged to Astan Quds Razavi (AQR), a multibillion pound religious foundation based in Mashhad.

AQR was led until his death in 2016 by ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi, who was appointed by the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini. The US sanctioned AQR in 2021, saying it controlled large parts of the Iranian economy for the benefit of Ali Khamenei and senior officials. Iranian filings also show Omran Razavi held stakes in 2013 in Bank Mellat and Bank Tejerat, both then sanctioned over Iran's nuclear programme. Ghandehari's lawyers say those small stakes were sold before Ori signed its agreement in December 2014, and that authorities in France and the US approved the deal.

The judgment also shows HP Trust owned Orico General Trading LLC until 2016. The company was contracted to supply Alcatel-Lucent telecoms equipment and move it from Dubai to Iran. It was then transferred to John Richard Simpson, a church warden from Potters Bar whose design firm counts the Ghandehari family as a client and gave Reform UK £200,000 last year. Simpson said he took on the company after extremists seized AQR and the project's assets, and that his aim was to wind it down after carrying out detailed checks.

The venture collapsed around 2016 as a hardliner replaced Vaez Tabasi and AQR took over the whole project. The project's chair, Mohammed Reza Noory, ended up in Evin prison serving an 18-year sentence. Both he and Ghandehari are named in leaked judicial papers published by the hacktivist group Edaalat Ali as having been under investigation in Iran.

Ghandehari's lawyers said it would be misleading to describe him as "working with Iran" without noting that he was later targeted with false accusations of working with hostile western powers. They said he sought political change through greater access to information, had never met Vaez Tabasi, and chose AQR because it was the only viable partner. They added that he has not visited Iran for 30 years and that his assets there were confiscated in 2016.

Tom Keatinge of the Rusi thinktank said doing business in Iran has long been risky because the line between state and private sector is blurred. He said it would be "pretty difficult to operate in an industry like telecoms" without the acceptance of the core leadership.

The revelations come as Farage has sharply criticised Tehran, backing Donald Trump's war against Iran and joining a protest outside the Iranian embassy in the spring. The source of Ghandehari's wealth remains unclear. In a recent court case over a Picasso painting, his lawyers pointed only to a Davos brochure when asked to show he could afford £1.5m in legal costs, and later withdrew an accountant's letter confirming his income from HP Trust.