Reform UK has accused the National Crime Agency of leaking Richard Tice’s bank statements to the Guardian, in a row that broke on the same extraordinary day Nigel Farage announced he would resign his Clacton seat.
What Tice is alleging
Tice, the MP for Boston and Skegness, made the accusations while speaking to LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr. He claims the NCA leaked bank statements belonging to his company, along with copies of conversations between him and his bank manager, to the Guardian, following a story reporting that his company had received a loan from convicted fraudster George Cottrell.
“The National Crime Agency have leaked copies of my company’s bank statements and copies of conversations between me and my bank manager to the Guardian,” Tice told Marr. “We’ve written to the Director General of the National Crime Agency. I’m asking whether the police should investigate. I’m asking for an internal inquiry. It’s absolutely outrageous.”
The Cottrell connection
Cottrell has separately been at the centre of significant recent scrutiny over his financial relationship with Nigel Farage, reportedly providing funding for security and staffing before Farage became an MP in July 2024. The allegation that Tice’s own company also received a loan connected to Cottrell adds a further dimension to a story that has already produced a formal Parliamentary Standards investigation into Farage’s undeclared £5m gift, a suspicious activity report filed with the National Crime Agency over the origin of those funds, and now Tice’s own separate allegation of an NCA leak concerning his own finances.
The NCA’s response
An NCA spokesperson gave LBC a carefully worded response that neither confirmed nor denied Tice’s specific claim: “The NCA does not confirm or deny the receipt of suspicious activity reports, nor comment on how any SAR is used. SARs are confidential and breaching that confidentiality risks committing a tipping off offence under the Proceeds of Crime Act.” This is the same standard formulation the agency has used in response to questions about the separate suspicious activity report filed over Farage’s £5m gift from Christopher Harborne, and it stops well short of either confirming a leak occurred or denying that any SAR concerning Tice exists.
Why the timing matters
Tice’s allegation landed on the same day Farage announced he would resign as MP for Clacton to trigger a byelection he intends to contest himself, a move widely interpreted as an attempt to reframe the ongoing scrutiny of his finances as a democratic mandate question rather than a regulatory or criminal one. Whether Tice’s leak allegation is intended to build a parallel argument, that the reporting on Reform’s senior figures reflects institutional bias or improper conduct within the NCA itself rather than legitimate financial scrutiny, or whether it stands as a genuinely separate concern about data protection and confidentiality, is likely to become a significant part of how this story develops in the coming days.
What an SAR leak would actually mean
If bank statements or private conversations with a bank manager genuinely originated from a suspicious activity report and were passed to a newspaper, that would represent a serious breach of the confidentiality obligations set out in the Proceeds of Crime Act, potentially amounting to a criminal tipping-off offence. That is a serious allegation regardless of the political context surrounding it, and one that would ordinarily warrant independent scrutiny irrespective of whoever raises it. At the same time, the NCA’s standard non-confirmation response makes it currently impossible to verify Tice’s central claim, that the source of the Guardian’s reporting was in fact a leak from within the agency itself, as opposed to information obtained through other reporting methods entirely unconnected to any SAR process.
The wider pattern
This is not the first instance of a senior Reform figure raising questions about the source or fairness of recent financial reporting on the party. Robert Jenrick has previously argued that critical coverage of Farage’s finances reflects a media agenda rather than legitimate scrutiny, a position that did not survive close questioning when tested directly by broadcasters including GB News’s Camilla Tominey. Tice’s NCA leak allegation follows a broadly similar pattern, raising a serious institutional question, but doing so at a moment when the party’s finances are under such sustained and multi-front scrutiny that any new allegation inevitably becomes entangled with the broader narrative Reform is trying to construct about unfair treatment.
What happens next
The Director General of the National Crime Agency has not yet issued a substantive response to Tice’s letter beyond the standard confidentiality statement given to LBC. Whether an internal inquiry into the alleged leak takes place, and whether its findings, if any, are ever made public given the same confidentiality restrictions that currently prevent the NCA from confirming or denying the underlying SAR reports, remains to be seen. For now, the allegation adds one more thread to an already extraordinarily complex week for Reform UK, in which its leader has resigned his seat, its Treasury spokesperson’s own company finances have become part of the story, and the party as a whole is now simultaneously managing a byelection campaign, two Parliamentary Standards investigations, at least one confirmed National Crime Agency suspicious activity report, and now a formal complaint against the agency itself.
2 responses to “Reform row deepens as Tice claims National Crime Agency leaked private financial records”
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The lot of them are as bent as a 9 Bob note. There’s no smoke without fire and far, far, too much money in politics. The whole of Westminster is a cesspit and Parliament should be moved to northern cities.
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