Nigel Farage breached parliamentary rules on declaring financial interests 17 times by failing to register earnings totalling £384,000 within the required 28-day window, the parliamentary commissioner for standards has found – though the watchdog ruled the breaches were “inadvertent” and will not recommend any sanctions against the Clacton MP.
Commissioner Daniel Greenberg concluded his investigation with a finding that, while the scale and number of the breaches gave him pause – describing his decision to close the case as “finely balanced” given the high value of some of the interests involved – he was satisfied that Farage had not deliberately sought to hide his financial dealings from parliament.
Farage has apologised and promised to meet the deadline in future.
What he failed to declare – and how late
The interests Farage failed to register on time span a wide range of commercial activities. They include payments from GB News, Google, X and the Cameo app – the platform through which celebrities record personalised video messages for fees.
The highest single payment registered late was £91,200 from Direct Bullion, a gold dealer for whom Farage works as a brand ambassador. The delays in registration ranged from four days to as long as 120 days – more than four months beyond the 28-day deadline that MPs are required to meet under the parliamentary code of conduct.
Rule five of the code states that new MPs must register all financial interests received in the 12 months before their election and that MPs “must register any change in those registrable interests within 28 days.”
How Farage explained himself
During a meeting with the commissioner on 11 December 2025, Farage said he had been “a little bit shocked” by what he called a “gross administrative error,” and blamed “a very senior member of staff” who he said had “extremely let him down.”
He offered an explanation for why the task had not been completed by him personally. “You may say, why don’t I enter those things myself. Well I don’t do computers,” he told the commissioner. “So I rely on other people to do those things for me. I’m not, I’m afraid, computer literate, which makes me yet more an oddball than perhaps I was before.”
Farage also attributed the failures to the rapid growth of his political operation. “Our political lives have exploded in the last 18 months in ways that we could never have comprehended. We are overwhelmed in every sense. Even my MP email gets 1,000 emails a day. And we’ve basically failed to cope with, or to be frank, not just with this, but with many other things too.”
He further argued that the system for registering interests was “not designed for anybody in business,” and noted that his outside income had enabled him to claim “zero personal expenses” as an MP.
The commissioner’s conclusion
Greenberg said the decision not to refer the case to the Committee on Standards was “finely balanced” given the high value of some of the interests. However, he concluded that the breaches were inadvertent, that Farage had apologised and given assurances about future compliance, and that no sanctions were warranted.
The political reaction
A Labour Party spokesperson said Farage “isn’t on the side of working people – he’s just lining his pockets when he should be standing up for his constituents.”
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper deployed the “Five Jobs Farage” framing that the party has used previously: “Five Jobs Farage is spending far too much time jetting off to talk our country down in the US and cashing in from his GB News show.”
The findings arrive at a politically inconvenient moment for a party whose deputy leader, Richard Tice, is simultaneously facing two separate allegations of tax non-compliance totalling – on the analysis of independent tax expert Dan Neidle – approximately £216,000 plus interest. Tice has himself been among the most vocal critics of other politicians’ financial conduct.
Reform UK’s repeated positioning as the party of the ordinary working person against a corrupt establishment is increasingly complicated by the financial transparency questions surrounding its two most senior figures.
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