Christopher Harborne

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Christopher Charles Sherriff Harborne (born December 1962) is a British–Thai billionaire businessman and technology investor based in Thailand. He is best known for filing a defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal for reporting related to his work in the cryptocurrency industry as well as his donations to British political parties. He has donated to the UK's Conservative Party and is the largest single donor to Reform UK.

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Christopher Harborne
December 1962 (age 63)
Chakrit Sakunkrit
United Kingdom, Thailand
Westminster School
Downing College, CambridgeINSEAD
Chief Executive Officer
Sherriff Global Group

Christopher Charles Sherriff Harborne (born December 1962) is a British–Thai billionaire businessman and technology investor based in Thailand. He is best known for filing a defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal for reporting related to his work in the cryptocurrency industry as well as his donations to British political parties. He has donated to the UK's Conservative Party and is the largest single donor to Reform UK.

He also holds Thai citizenship under the name Chakrit Sakunkrit.

Christopher Harborne was born on 18 December 1962 in Mosborough, Sheffield, to Edgar Harborne, an insurance investor, and homemaker Joan. He is a descendent of English writer R. C. Sherriff and has two siblings, including his late sister Katharine. He was educated at Westminster School and at Downing College, Cambridge, where he received the degrees of MA and MEng. He also received an MBA from the Institut européen d'administration des affaires (INSEAD) in 1988.

Harborne worked for five years as a management consultant at McKinsey and Co., before running a research company in Asia. He describes himself as an "investor in new tech, including open software blockchain platforms". He is the CEO of Sherriff Global Group which trades in private planes, and the owner of AML Global, a firm that sells aviation fuel. He is a billionaire. He has made a donation to enable the founding of INSEAD San Francisco and to create a Blockchain Research Fund. He has set up a company, Singular AI Consulting Limited, with cryptocurrency miner Marco Streng. As of December 2019, he is based in Thailand.

According to The Times, Harborne's name "features in the Panama Papers as an intermediary of companies linked to offshore accounts".

Harborne donated more than £6m to the Brexit Party in 2019, £3 million in the summer and £3 million before the United Kingdom general election in 2019, making him the largest donor that year.

Before switching his donations to the Brexit Party, Harborne had donated smaller sums, averaging £15,000 per annum since 2001 totalling about £270,000, to the Conservative Party. In November 2022, Harborne donated £1 million to The Office of Boris Johnson Ltd, one of the biggest donations ever made to an individual British politician. The government awarded Qinetiq, a company in which Harborne was the largest single shareholder, an £80 million Ministry of Defence contract in January 2023. He acted as an advisor to Boris Johnson on his trip to Kyiv in September 2023 to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In 2024 he donated £5 million to Nigel Farage, shortly before Farage announced that he had changed his mind and decided to stand as a candidate in that year's general election.

Harborne donated £9 million to Reform UK in 2025, and a further £3 million in March 2026, making him the largest single donator to a UK political party in a financial year in UK history.

In March 2023, The Wall Street Journal published an article about banking arrangements for the cryptocurrency companies Tether and Bitfinex which linked Harborne and his aviation fuel company AML Global Ltd to those arrangements. The article alleged that AML Global had helped the companies gain access to the U.S. banking system by concealing their identities and suggested that Harborne had misrepresented his ownership of a minority stake in Bitfinex and Tether under his Thai name 'Chakrit Sakunkrit' when opening a bank account at Signature Bank.

In February 2024, Harborne filed a defamation suit against Dow Jones & Company, the *Journal'*s publisher, in the Superior Court of Delaware. He alleged the article falsely accused him of fraud, money laundering and terrorism financing and of operating a shell company for illicit purposes and that AML Global never handled funds for Tether or Bitfinex.

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