Reform UK calls for probe into $50K SBF-linked donation to UK Defence Secretary

The tangled financial legacy of Sam Bankman-Fried just surfaced in an unlikely place: the office of Britain’s Defence Secretary.

Reform UK chair Lee Anderson has formally requested an investigation into donations totaling £37,500 (roughly $50,500) received by UK Defence Secretary Wes Streeting from Labour for the Long Term (LLT), a now-defunct think tank with ties to the Labour Party. The call follows a Telegraph investigation that drew a financial line between those donations and a £500,000 contribution from SBF to LLT founder David Lawrence in July 2022.

The money trail

The timeline is what makes this politically uncomfortable. Lawrence received £500,000 from Bankman-Fried in July 2022. The following month, August 2022, LLT made its largest donation to Streeting: £30,000. A second payment of £7,500 followed in August 2023.

The money was earmarked to fund a part-time policy adviser for Streeting. Streeting has maintained that every donation was properly declared and that he had no knowledge of where LLT’s money originally came from. Lawrence has echoed that defense, arguing that the funds supporting Streeting came from an entirely separate pool of money, unrelated to the SBF contribution.

LLT itself has since ceased operations. The think tank was established shortly before the SBF donation arrived, a detail that adds an extra layer of unease to the narrative.

SBF’s political spending spree

SBF was convicted in November 2023 on seven counts, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The conviction centered on the misuse of billions in FTX customer funds, which were secretly redirected to his trading firm Alameda Research and used for, among other things, political donations and real estate purchases in the Bahamas.

The legal proceedings in the US resulted in the forfeiture and clawback of many SBF-linked political donations. American recipients were pressured to return funds. Whether similar mechanisms exist for donations that flowed through intermediaries into the UK political system is a murkier question.

Political fallout and the transparency debate

The UK’s political donation framework requires recipients to declare the direct source of funds. If LLT donated £37,500 to Streeting, and Streeting declared LLT as the donor, the technical requirements were met. But the system doesn’t impose an obligation to trace money back through multiple layers.

Concerns about LLT’s funding sources were reportedly voiced by senior Labour figures, with some in the shadow cabinet refusing similar offers from LLT.

Lawrence’s defense, that the Streeting donations came from a different bucket of LLT money than the SBF contribution, is the kind of argument that works on a spreadsheet but struggles in the court of public opinion. When an organization receives £500,000 from a single donor and then distributes tens of thousands to politicians, the fungibility of money makes it difficult to credibly claim complete separation, even if the accounting technically supports it.

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