Nigel Farage (left) with Sasan Ghandehari, who says he runs a $10bn fund called HP Trust. Photograph: Jeff Gilbert\/AlamyView image in fullscreenNigel Farage (left) with Sasan Ghandehari, who says he runs a $10bn fund called HP Trust. Photograph: Jeff Gilbert\/AlamyRevealed: billionaire Reform donor was in business with foundation linked to Iranian regimeExclusive: Sasan Ghandehari\u2019s partnership with religious foundation raises questions about past dealings with republic criticised by Nigel FarageNigel Farage\u2019s newest billionaire donor was in business with a powerful Iranian religious foundation under the authority of the country\u2019s 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 \u00a350,000 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 \u201cregular payments\u201d of more than \u201cone or two million\u201d to the party.The 61-year-old Iranian-born British businessman, who says he runs a $10bn (\u00a37bn) 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\u2019s past dealings with Iranian state-linked entities between 2013 and 2016.It also reveals Ghandehari\u2019s further Iranian business links to another Reform UK donor, John Richard Simpson, an administration professional and church warden from Potters Bar, north of London. Simpson\u2019s design firm, Interior Architecture Landscape, counts the Ghandehari family as a client and gave \u00a3200,000 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s second city of Mashhad.AQR\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201csedition\u201d in the country were \u201cenemies of god\u201d 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.View image in fullscreenLawyers for Sasan Ghandehari said his involvement was intended to promote political change through greater access to information. Photograph: Jeff Gilbert\/AlamyThe US imposed sanctions on AQR in 2021, saying it controlled \u201clarge 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\u201d. It describes it as a bonyad, one of the \u201copaque, quasi-official organisations generally controlled by current and former government officials and clerics that report directly to the supreme leader\u201d.Ghandehari\u2019s lawyers said it would be misleading to characterise him as \u201cworking with Iran\u201d without the context that, after 2016, he was targeted by Iran\u2019s 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 \u201chas always been a risky business as a financial institution because of this blurring between kind of state and the private sector.<\/p>\n
The private sector is not free to operate. It\u2019s just very hard to operate in that country without touching a live rail.\u201dHe said there was clearly a range of positions among ayatollahs but it would be \u201cpretty difficult to operate in an industry like telecoms\u201d without the acceptance of the core leadership.The judgment also revealed that, until 2016, Ghandehari\u2019s HP Trust was the owner of Orico General Trading LLC, which was contracted to supply telecoms equipment from France\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s lawyers said AQR was independent and respected, and therefore the only viable choice for a joint venture in Iran.<\/p>\n
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.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe 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\u2019s nuclear programme at that point.Ghandehari\u2019s lawyers said Omran Razavi disposed of the small stakes in the banks before HP Trust\u2019s 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\u2019s chair, Mohammed Reza Noory, ended up in Iran\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Ghandehari\u2019s lawyers say he first became aware of the \u201cbogus allegations\u201d during French court proceedings and that the intelligence services had not given him any further details. Ghandehari\u2019s representatives said fabricating financial and social cases against its targets to discredit them was part of the Iranian regime\u2019s playbook and had been widely documented and recognised by western governments, human rights organisations and independent journalists.Ghandehari\u2019s 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\u2019s government this year, supporting Donald Trump\u2019s war against it, and attending a pr<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nigel Farage (left) with Sasan Ghandehari, who says he runs a $10bn fund called HP Trust. Photograph: Jeff Gilbert\/AlamyView image in fullscreenNigel Farage (left) with Sasan Ghandehari, who says he runs a $10bn fund called\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}