Chris Harborne

So now Harborne really is established as this kind of mega-donor.

So I spoke to a guy called Mark Velikot.

He's going to be a reform candidate in these local elections very shortly.

And he was also, for a long time, a close friend of Catherine Harbourn.

And Mark Velikot describes Harbourn as a very level guy, a very gentle guy, and someone who wants to be king of crypto.

He says when he looks at Harborne participating in UK politics, giving money, involved in UK politics, he sees that that, he thinks, is with an eye, sure, to a political agenda, but also to advancing the crypto cause, right?

How crypto is going to be treated in the UK and how crypto is going to be treated globally.

I think what's happening with crypto is an enormous war between the bros, essentially, the billionaires and the people who run cryptocurrency and nation states, so to say, and law enforcement agencies and so on.

And especially under Joe Biden, there was this sense of like, right, we need to get a grip on this stuff because it's a huge engine of money laundering.

I mean, crypto again and again and again, it's found to be used for sanctions evasion.

The Russian war machine makes use of crypto, specifically tethers, tokens.

I mean, again and again, North Korean hackers, the Iranian regime.

This is the examples I'm giving are specifically tethers, stable coin.

And so there is this huge battle.

to try to control what is at least partially an enormous new avenue for dirty money to move around the world incognito.

Now, obviously, crypto has all sorts of perfectly legitimate uses as a stable coin.

But this is the big battle.

Now, in the US, Trump is a big crypto convert, right?

His family is hugely into crypto and they're making loads of money out of it.

The UK, it's in the balance, I would say.