Ben Delo, co-founder of cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMEX and one of the two donors behind the largest single gifts in the history of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, privately financed the unsuccessful joint High Court libel action brought by former philosophy academic Nina Power and writer Daniel Miller against British Jewish artist Luke Turner.
According to an exclusive report by the Financial Times, Delo now effectively controls Power’s London flat through a mortgage charge registered in his name days before the case went to trial.
The FT investigation, published on 17 September 2026, states that Delo loaned Power more than £300,000 to fund the litigation and that the loan was secured against her home.
After Power and Miller lost the case in November 2023 and Power was declared bankrupt in July 2024, Delo enforced the security, which prevented other creditors from forcing a sale of the property, and he now receives monthly rent from Power while she remains the legal owner on paper.
The Libel Case and the Costs Order
Power, a former senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Roehampton and a current Daily Telegraph contributor, and Miller, a writer, sued Turner in 2019 over 16 tweets and the content warning on a webpage archive that Turner had published between October 2018 and August 2019.
Turner, who is best known for the “I Am Not Famous Anymore” and “#IAMSORRY” collaborations with the actor Shia LaBeouf, had alleged that the pair ran an antisemitic online harassment campaign against him, and he counterclaimed for harassment.
The seven-day trial took place in October 2023 before Mrs Justice Collins Rice in the King’s Bench Division (KB) of the High Court. Judgment was handed down on 8 November 2023 under the neutral citation [2023] EWHC 2799 (KB).
The judge dismissed the libel claims after finding that the claimants had failed to prove the “serious harm” threshold under section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013. She also dismissed Turner’s harassment counterclaim, while recording that the pair’s conduct amounted to a course of “bullying” with “the whiff of threat and antisemitism” that fell short only of the high quasi-criminal threshold required by the statute.
Power and Miller were ordered to pay 80% of Turner’s costs, with an initial payment of £250,000 due within 14 days. Turner subsequently petitioned to make both claimants bankrupt. Miller was declared bankrupt in February 2024, and Power followed in July 2024.
The Mortgage Charge and the Monthly Rent
According to the Financial Times, HM Land Registry filings show that Delo registered a mortgage charge over Power’s flat on 20 September 2023, weeks before the trial began. Power had bought the property for £249,000 in 2012, using money from her parents. After the bankruptcy was declared, Delo enforced his security, which put him ahead of Turner and other creditors and blocked a forced sale of the home.
People familiar with the arrangement told the FT that Delo now functions as Power’s landlord and that the monthly payments she makes to him are treated as repayments on the loan. Neither Delo nor Power issued a public statement in response to the report at the time of publication.
Turner had first publicly named Delo as the funder on 31 March 2026, stating that the insolvency practitioner managing the two bankruptcies had uncovered a paper trail showing that Delo paid the claimants’ solicitor, the London firm Patron Law, directly, and that he had taken a 100% charge over Power’s home on the eve of trial. The Financial Times report is the first mainstream newspaper confirmation of the current ownership and rental arrangement.
Bank Secrecy Act Guilty Plea, Trump Pardon and Political Donations
Delo, 42, co-founded BitMEX, one of the earliest cryptocurrency derivatives platforms, with Arthur Hayes and Samuel Reed in 2014. In February 2022, he pleaded guilty in the United States (US) to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) over the exchange’s failure to establish and maintain an adequate anti-money laundering (AML) programme, and he was sentenced on 15 June 2022 by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to 30 months of probation.
On 27 March 2025, US President Donald Trump granted him a full and unconditional pardon alongside Hayes, Reed, former BitMEX head of business development Gregory Dwyer, and BitMEX operating entity HDR Global Trading Limited. BitMEX has separately said it will cease operations at 04:00 UTC on 23 September 2026 after a strategic review.
The FT disclosure comes six days after Delo made a record £36 million cash donation to Reform UK, which he announced in a Daily Telegraph op-ed on 11 September 2026. Christopher Harborne, a British investor who holds a large stake in stablecoin issuer Tether Limited, matched the sum on 12 September 2026, taking the combined two-day total to £72 million (about $97 million).
According to the report, Delo’s donations to Reform UK this year now stand at £44 million, with £8 million given earlier in 2026 before the £36 million gift.
Reform UK, which is under a continuing Metropolitan Police (Met) investigation into its fundraising practices, has not commented publicly on the personal loan reported by the FT. Farage is separately facing a parliamentary standards inquiry over a £5 million personal gift he received from Harborne.
A joint investigation by The Guardian and campaign group HOPE not hate had earlier reported in March 2026 that Delo funds The Sanctuary, a Westminster base that the two organisations said is used free of charge by a range of political projects they described as right-wing.
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