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Nigel Farage has increased his shareholding in GB News while George Farmer, the former boss of US social media platform Parler, has become an investor in the right-wing British broadcaster.
According to documents filed by the company this week, GB News has also awarded extra shares to members of its broadcasting staff and management, including City fund manager Helena Morrissey and its chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos.
In addition, the filings show that Dan Wootton and Laurence Fox are both still shareholders despite having left the channel. Fox, the actor turned politician and leader of the Reclaim party, was taken off air last year from the channel after making sexist comments about a journalist. Wootton left GB News in March after regulator Ofcom deemed the episode of his show that both appeared in had broken broadcasting rules.
The lossmaking broadcaster is mostly owned and funded by Sir Paul Marshall, the British hedge fund tycoon, and Dubai-based Legatum Ventures. The two shareholders have been funding the channel through loans that can be drawn as necessary, according to people close to the situation.
The UK High Court heard earlier this month that GB News faced the prospect of a significant fine after failing in its legal challenge to stop an ongoing sanctions process by Ofcom, although a final decision by the regulator is still needed in the coming weeks.
Farmer is the newest conservative media executive to join the broadcaster as a shareholder, having been appointed as a director last year. He is the son of former treasurer of the Conservative party and life peer Lord Michael Farmer, who is also already a shareholder in GB News.
Farmer was running Parler in 2022 when it was announced that the platform would be bought by Kanye West, although the app was subsequently closed. His wife, Candace Owens, is a well-known US conservative political commentator.
In the last set of filings last year, Farage owned close to 300,000 shares in the group through his business, Thorn In The Side. That has risen to nearly 500,000, according to filings in Companies House this week.
This stake as a percentage of shares outstanding was still roughly the same given an increase in the number of overall shares outstanding, said one person close to the company, although other shareholders have been diluted as a result.
The Financial Times revealed last year that GB News had handed shares to its top presenters and contributors, including Farage and former Conservative business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Other presenters with stakes include Eamonn Holmes and journalist Camilla Tominey, who is also an associate editor of The Daily Telegraph.
Many of these shares have been given as incentives to staff in the form of growth stock, which tend to benefit at a defined valuation of the company.
GB News declined to comment. Farmer was asked to comment through GB News. Morrissey was not available for comment.
The channel has a number of current and past Conservative MPs as presenters, which has led to repeated breaches of the broadcasting code over the lack of due impartiality of some of its shows.
Doubt has been cast over the future of MPs conducting paid media roles, with the government signalling a crackdown may be on the way. Leader of the House of Commons Lucy Powell last month told MPs that the cross-party modernisation committee she had launched to improve House procedures, standards and working practices would review the rules on MPs’ paid media engagements.
A government official said further examination was needed about the appropriateness of MPs being employed — often on lucrative contracts — by media organisations, adding: “There’s a question whether it’s a conflict of interest with their parliamentary duties.”
The committee is set to focus on formal or regular media roles and is unlikely to consider banning ad hoc broadcast appearances or written articles for newspapers, according to people familiar with its plans.
Farage, who declined to comment on his shareholding in GB News, told the Financial Times: “I think that the modernisation committee are aiming squarely at myself, Lee Anderson and GB News. They are clearly very scared of us.”
