Hossein Ghandehari, a 61-year-old Iranian-born British billionaire who has pledged millions to Nigel Farage's Reform UK, was the major investor behind a joint venture to build fibre-optic cable across Iran with Astan Quds Razavi (AQR), a multibillion-pound religious foundation operating under the authority of Iran's supreme leader. The details emerge from a French arbitration decision obtained by the Guardian, revealing business links between 2013 and 2016 that Ghandehari's own party leader has spent this year rhetorically attacking. Ghandehari's HP Trust — the same entity he claims controls $10bn in assets — was the ultimate owner of Ori Group, which held a 49% stake in the joint venture, Omran Razavi International Co. The other 51% belonged to AQR, whose leader at the time was Ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi, appointed by Khomeini himself and reported by state media to have said those behind opposition movements were "enemies of god" deserving execution under sharia law. The US sanctioned AQR in 2021, describing it as an opaque quasi-official organisation reporting directly to the supreme leader and controlling "large swaths of the Iranian economy, including assets expropriated from political dissidents and religious minorities." The venture's Iranian state connections run deeper. The original fibre-optic contract was awarded by the state-owned Telecommunication Infrastructure Company of Iran. Iranian corporate filings show Omran Razavi also held stakes in two majority state-owned banks — Bank Mellat and Bank Tejerat — both under sanctions over Iran's nuclear programme in 2013. Ghandehari's lawyers say those bank stakes were disposed of before HP Trust's Ori Group signed its 49% agreement in December 2014, and that French and US authorities approved the deal. The deal collapsed around 2016 when a hardliner replaced Vaez Tabasi at AQR, and the foundation seized the entire venture. The project's chair, Mohammed Reza Noory, ended up serving 18 years in Evin prison. Leaked judicial papers published by hacktivist group Edaalat Ali name both Ghandehari and Noory as subjects of Iranian investigation. Ghandehari's lawyers frame this as the regime fabricating cases to discredit targets — a documented playbook — and say he hasn't visited Iran in 30 years. The story also surfaces a second Reform UK donor embedded in the same network. John Richard Simpson, an administration professional and church warden from Potters Bar who gave £200,000 to Reform UK last year, acquired Ghandehari's Orico General Trading LLC after 2016. That company had been contracted to supply Alcatel-Lucent telecoms equipment and transport it from Dubai to Iran. Simpson says he took it over to wind down operations after Iranian extremists seized the project's assets. The provenance of Ghandehari's wealth remains genuinely unclear. His fortune reportedly grew from an estimated $2bn in 2008 — when his late mother bought property on London's "billionaire's row" — to a claimed $10bn today. When asked in a recent court case over a Picasso painting to prove he could afford £1.5m in legal costs, his lawyers pointed only to a Davos trip brochure describing his trust. A letter from a "partner in a leading accountancy firm" confirming his income was offered then withdrawn because Ghandehari did not want its contents public. Farage, meanwhile, has spent 2025 casting Iran as a bigger danger to the UK than Putin, attending protests outside the Iranian embassy, and warning about Iranian agents crossing the Channel in small boats. The Telegraph ran a joint interview with Farage and Ghandehari in July describing the Iran deal without mentioning AQR's regime links. The gap between Reform's anti-Iran rhetoric and its funding sources is not a contradiction the party has been asked to resolve — until now.
