Nigel Farage hints at ‘far more’ to debanking scandal | Politics | News

Nigel Farage has hinted that there is “far more” to the scandal of banks closing or revoking the accounts of political figures than his dispute with Coutts last year.

The Reform UK leader said the “debanking issue” is “about far more than what happened to me”, in response to accusations made by a Silicon Valley businessman on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

The clip showed Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser with a graphic user interface, alleging “tech founders, crypto founders and just generally [Biden’s] political opponents” had been debanked.

He added: “In the tech world, we’ve had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years”, though didn’t name the individuals supposedly affected.

It was shared by X owner Elon Musk, alongside the message: “Did you know that 30 tech founders were secretly debanked?”

While the podcast clip relates to the US market, which has seen cryptocurrency soar since Donald Trump‘s election, Mr Farage implied a wider issue underlying his battle with a high-end bank in June 2023.

The MP for Clacton-on-Sea claimed that Coutts, which is owned by NatWest, had closed his account because they disagreed with his political beliefs. The scandal led to the resignation of NatWest chief executive Alison Rose after she admitted a “serious error of judgement” in discussing Mr Farage’s relationship with Coutts with a BBC journalist.

Despite this, the bank maintained that the decision to shut down his account was lawful and based on commercial reasons.

The UK’s financial watchdog responded to the backlash by calling on banks to improve the way they treat so-called Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs).

The Financial Conduct Authority found that most banks weren’t imposing unnecessary checks and that while some political figures had been denied banking services or had their accounts closed, this was generally due to “financial crime reasons”.

The watchdog did identify a small number of cases were information requests for PEPs were “disproportionate”, however. PEPs are generally subject to extra due diligence from banks because they pose a greater risk of abusing their position for financial gain, according to the FCA’s 2017 guidance.

In December 2023, the government changed the law to say UK PEPs should be treated as “inherently lower risk” than overseas politicians.