A donor to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has a senior role at a Dubai-based company that until 2016 had business ties to a since-sanctioned Iranian conglomerate with deep links to the Islamic republic’s government.
John Simpson, a church warden and conveyancer, is the registered manager and shareholder of Dubai-based Orico General Trading LLC, according to documents seen by the FT.
Simpson is also listed publicly as the person with significant control of Interior Architecture Landscape Limited (IAL Ltd), a UK company that donated £200,000 to Reform last year and whose clients include Iranian billionaire Sasan Ghandehari and his family.
French legal documents released last month described Orico as a subsidiary of Iranian company Omran Razavi International Co. The Iranian group is majority owned by the Astan Quds Razavi religious foundation, a leading financial conglomerate in Iran that is under US sanctions.
Three months after being set up in Dubai in June 2012, Orico agreed to supply Omran Razavi with goods and services and a year later signed a €145mn deal as part of a contract with the state-owned Telecommunications Infrastructure Company of Iran (TIC), according to a 2020 arbitration request.
Orico did not comment, but a person close to Orico said Omran Razavi was a joint-venture vehicle between a foreign investor and Astan Quds Razavi (AQR). They declined to answer questions about whether the foreign investor was Sasan Ghandehari.
The person close to Orico said the company was “privately owned” and “is not, and has never been, a subsidiary of any Iranian regime entity, whether directly or indirectly”.
“Until March 2016 and the suspicious death of its long-serving custodian, AQR remained independent of the Iranian regime and the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps],” the person added.
The link between Orico and Iran came to light in a court ruling last month by the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, which upheld the withdrawal of refugee status from an unidentified man.
Referred to as “Mr C”, the man was alleged to have embezzled several million euros for his “personal enrichment” in his roles at AQR, Omran Razavi and Orico. The person close to Orico denied Mr C had worked for the company.
In 2021, the US Treasury Department placed AQR under sanctions, citing its control of “large swaths of the Iranian economy” and its links to then supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior government officials.
Iran’s supreme leader selects the head of AQR, and in 1979 Khamenei was made “head of the servants” of the organisation. It is under the direct supervision of the Iranian president and the supreme leader.
The US Treasury said that, as of 2021, AQR was directed by Ahmad Marvi, a cleric and close associate of Khamenei, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in February this year. AQR was previously run by former Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi.
AQR’s former custodian, the cleric Ayatollah Abbas Vaez-Tabasi, died from “respiratory complications”, having fallen into a coma at the age of 80 in 2016. Vaez-Tabasi, who upon his death was described by Khamenei as a “sympathetic and understanding brother to me”, was replaced by Raisi.
Raisi — who maintained strong bonds with the elite IRGC, which is also under international sanctions — became president in 2021 before dying in a helicopter crash in 2024.
The person close to Orico said Raisi had been appointed to “pave the way for the full takeover” of AQR by the IRGC, and that in May 2016 he “extrajudicially expropriated all assets belonging to Orico as well as Omran’s foreign investors . . . under the pretext of national security”.
Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
Simpson’s link to Reform has been called into question by Liam Byrne, chair of the UK House of Commons business and trade select committee. In February, the senior Labour MP asked Companies House, the UK corporate registry, to open a formal probe into the accuracy of IAL Ltd’s register.
IAL had £81,432 in cash as of January 2025, according to its accounts. Between June and August 2025, it made seven donations to Reform totalling £200,000, according to the Electoral Commission.
Ghandehari and his family are clients of IAL Ltd while the company’s former owner, Richard Darby, works for HP Trust, the family investment office of Ghandehari, according to a document seen by the FT.
HP Trust sponsored Farage’s visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos in February. Ghandehari has denied being the source of IAL’s donations to Reform.
IAL, which says it specialises in luxury home design, told the FT in a statement that the company was “engaged on contracts with aggregate values in excess of £15mn”.
“These are live and recent engagements and are what enabled the company to make the donations to Reform,” it added. IAL and Simpson did not comment on Simpson’s link to Orico.
A lawyer for Ghandehari declined to comment.
In total, Simpson is listed as the director of four active companies, all registered at the same address in Chiswick, West London.
At a press conference in February, Farage said that while he knew most of his donors, he did not know Simpson. Farage’s spokesperson previously told the Sunday Times that the Ghandeharis “are friends of the party”.
Reform UK said in a statement: “This story is about a company [Orico] that hasn’t donated to us. We can confirm that we have carried out all the checks required in relation to company donors.”
Leave a Reply