A company owned by billionaire Reform UK donor Christopher Harborne is contracted to supply the US military with jet fuel from refineries that take oil from Russia and Iran. 

Harborne’s aviation fuel brokerage, AML Global, holds active contracts worth up to £82m to arrange the refueling of US military aircraft at commercial airports around the world.

At least four refineries listed in the contracts as sources of AML’s jet fuel have imported crude oil from Russia, Iran, or Venezuela in recent years, an investigation by Unearthed and the research organisation Data Desk has revealed. 

Susan Hawley, executive director of the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption, said the findings raised “real questions about whether a major political party in the UK is being bankrolled by money made from selling fuel sourced from states that are hostile to our democracy”.

AML Global has had a sanctions policy in place since mid-April 2024 at the latest, which states that it “will not arrange nor facilitate the supply or use” of any aviation fuel believed to have been sourced from Russia, Iran or Venezuela. Most of the shipments identified by Unearthed and Data Desk took place after that date.

Christopher Harborne’s enormous wealth already casts a long shadow over Nigel Farage and Reform UK – we cannot afford to ignore the damage this kind of money and influence can cause

— Green Party MP Ellie Chowns

There is no suggestion, however, that AML breached this sanctions policy, because the refineries in question are not based in any of the listed countries. The policy does not appear to prohibit the use of jet fuel refined from sanctioned crude. 

Likewise, there is no suggestion that the company has breached UK or international sanctions: the UK’s sanctions on Russia, for example, still include a notorious loophole that allows the purchase of jet fuel made from Russian oil, provided it is refined in “third countries” like India or Turkey. 

However, the findings have raised further concerns about Harborne’s business interests, which have come under intense scrutiny since it was revealed that the Thailand-based billionaire gave Reform leader Nigel Farage £5m shortly before he decided to stand in the 2024 election. 

“This raises even more serious questions for Reform UK,” Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake MP told the Times newspaper. “Not only is Nigel Farage a Putin apologist, but his party’s biggest financial backer, the man who dropped £5m into Farage’s personal bank account, now appears to be profiting from fuel derived from Russian crude.”

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson Calum Miller MP said Reform should not accept “a single penny more from Christopher Harborne” until they can prove “their party coffers are not being funded through the back door by Russian crude”. 

He added that Farage needed to “come clean immediately about whether his party is profiting from a firm that has potentially helped fund Putin’s war in Ukraine, and the Standards Commissioner should investigate whether anything has been promised to Harborne on Reform foreign policy in exchange for his money.”

In May, the Labour government’s then-defence secretary John Healey wrote to Farage seeking assurances that none of the profits which contributed to his £5m gift “derived from transactions with Russian state-linked energy companies”. Healey also asked for confirmation that no fuel “sourced from Russian-controlled refineries” had passed through AML Global’s supply chain. 

AML Global said in response that it complied fully with all UK and international sanctions and had screened its business partners to ensure the same.

A Reform UK spokesperson this week told the Times that no part of Harborne’s £5m gift to Farage was drawn from money paid out from AML. However, the party otherwise declined to comment on the findings of the investigation. 

Farage is currently under investigation by the parliamentary commissioner for standards for failing to declare the money he received from Harborne in the register of members’ interests. The Reform leader has said he was under no obligation to declare the money, because he received it before becoming an MP.

Separately to the money he has gifted Farage personally, Harborne is by far Reform’s biggest financial backer. Last year, he donated at least £12m to the radical right party, including a £9m donation in August that was reportedly the largest sum ever given to a British political party by a living person. In the first quarter of 2026, the cryptocurrency investor pumped a further £3m into Reform, just before the government introduced a cap of £100,000 on political donations by British citizens living overseas.

AML and Christopher Harborne have been approached for comment.

The refining loophole

Unearthed obtained eight active contracts awarded to AML Global between 2023 and 2026 by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), a US government agency responsible for procuring fuel and other supplies for military operations. The contracts cover refuelling services for US military and government aircraft at more than 30 airports across Africa, Asia and the Pacific. 

The contracts identify the refuelling companies working with AML Global to provide the fuel, along with the refineries that supply it. Fuel from these refineries is delivered into the airports’ fuel infrastructure, where it is kept in pooled storage facilities. Any aircraft refuelling company at an airport will usually be supplied from the same pool. 

Using data from commodity-tracking service Kpler, Unearthed and Data Desk traced crude oil deliveries to those refineries. The analysis identified four refineries listed in active AML Global contracts that have received more than 62m tonnes of crude oil from Russia, Iran, or Venezuela after the relevant contracts began. 

The overwhelming majority of that total – 86% – was Russian oil delivered to the Jamnagar refinery complex in India, the flagship facility of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries. 

The refinery received over 53m tonnes of Russian crude from the start of 2024 up to 28 May this year, and a further 6.4m tonnes from Venezuela. The facility also imported a cargo of 277,000 tonnes of Iranian crude delivered during a temporary US sanctions waiver that allowed India to resume limited imports from Iran. 

AML Global has a deal to supply US military planes with fuel sourced from the Jamnagar refinery at an airport in Abuja, Nigeria. The contract is worth up to £653,000, and runs from January 2024 to the end of September next year.

Reliance has continued importing large volumes of Russian crude since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, taking advantage of discounted prices and a Western sanctions regime that generally targets Russian crude exports rather than fuels refined in third countries. Much of the fuel produced in this way has been exported to Europe and the UK. At the start of this year the EU moved to close this refining loophole by banning the import of “refined oil products derived from Russian crude”.  

When a donor’s international commercial interests intersect with sanctioned jurisdictions, the potential for conflicts of interest – or just the appearance of them – is obvious

— Steve Goodrich, Transparency International UK

The UK government had intended to follow suit with a sanctions package introduced in May. However, at the last minute it delayed the ban on Russian-derived jet fuel and diesel, amid concerns about potential fuel shortages caused by the US-Israeli war with Iran.

Svitlana Romanko, executive director of Ukrainian group Razom We Stand, which campaigns against the trade in Russian oil and gas, said the refining loophole was “not a loophole – it’s a highway”. 

She continued: “Russian crude goes into refineries in third countries, and ‘clean’ jet fuel and diesel come out the other side, stripped of their origin on paper but not of their blood.”

Reliance is not the only source of fuel for AML’s deals that is using Russian crude. Harborne’s company has a contract worth up to £613,000 to refuel US planes in the tiny Asian country of Brunei. Since the start of that contract, in August 2025, the local refinery that supplies the jet fuel has imported 1.6m tonnes of Russian crude. 

AML also has deals worth up to £3.1m in total to refuel US military aircraft at airports in Ghana and the Philippines. The refineries listed as sources of that fuel have received a combined 486,000 tonnes of crude from Russia since the start of the contracts. 

With the exception of Reliance’s Jamnagar facility each of these refineries is listed as supplying aviation fuel to airports within its own country. 

To assess whether the airports were actively being used by the US military, Unearthed reviewed historical flight records on Flightradar24 for all four airports during the relevant contract periods. This review found that multiple US military aircraft have landed at each site since the contracts have been in effect. 

At Accra International Airport in Ghana, for example, at least 16 separate US military and government aircraft had landed after AML’s contact with the DLA began there in February 2024.

Romanko told Unearthed: “If these findings are accurate, they are as shameful as they are unsurprising. 

“The same military that stands as the backbone of Western security may have been flying on fuel whose profits flow back to the Kremlin’s war chest, the war chest paying for the missiles and drones that kill Ukrainian civilians every night.”

Unearthed has approached the DLA for comment.

A ‘long shadow’

Transparency campaigners and politicians told Unearthed the investigation demonstrated the need for further reform of UK rules around political donations. 

“When a party becomes dependent on a single wealthy backer, its reputation gets tied to theirs – and stories like this show exactly why that matters,” said Steve Goodrich, head of research and investigations at the campaign group Transparency International UK. 

“When a donor’s international commercial interests intersect with sanctioned jurisdictions, the potential for conflicts of interest – or just the appearance of them – is obvious. The only real protection is not letting any individual donor become indispensable in the first place – which is why the public rightly want a cap on what any one person can give.”

In March this year, the Labour government introduced an annual cap of £100,000 on political donations by British citizens living abroad. The move was seen by Reform as an attempt by Labour to “choke off” funding for Reform from donors like Harborne and fellow cryptocurrency billionaire Ben Delo, who at the time was based in Hong Kong. 

However, there is still effectively no limit on the amount a UK-resident British citizen can donate.

Green Party MP Ellie Chowns said Unearthed’s findings were “extremely troubling”, and demonstrated the risks that “opaque supply chains pose to democratic politics and defence contracting – especially in providing indirect support to authoritarian regimes like Russia”.

She added: “Christopher Harborne’s enormous wealth already casts a long shadow over Nigel Farage and Reform UK – we cannot afford to ignore the damage this kind of money and influence can cause politics in the UK and abroad. The government must work urgently to bring in tougher rules around political donations and lobbying to stop politics being warped by powerful interests.”

A Labour Party spokesman said: “Sadly these latest revelations come as no surprise given Farage has previously said Putin is the leader he admires most. The scandal engulfing Farage and Reform isn’t going away – it’s time he put all the facts on the table over his secret £5 million gift and levelled with the public as to the true extent of his relationship with Christopher Harborne.”