Richard Tice has written to the National Crime Agency asking whether it will investigate its own possible role in leaking his private financial information to the media. The Reform UK deputy leader confirmed the letter on X, saying he believes "someone at the NCA leaked bank statements" and calling for police to investigate the agency itself Richard Tice on X.

The dispute centres on Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs — confidential filings made under the Proceeds of Crime Act by banks and other regulated firms when they flag transactions for possible money laundering. Payments made to organisations linked to Tice were flagged through the SARs regime, and Tice says he only learned of this when contacted by the Guardian BBC. Reform UK believes the Guardian's information is likely to have come from the NCA itself, an inference the party has not evidenced publicly but which underpins its formal complaint.

The Telegraph reported on 7 July that Reform UK had formally accused the NCA of illegally leaking its MPs' bank statements to the press Telegraph. The Express, in a separate report the same day, said Nigel Farage's bank statements were leaked alongside Tice's, and that Tice regards the NCA as the only body capable of having disclosed the material Express.

The NCA has declined to confirm or deny receiving any SARs relating to Tice, saying as a matter of policy it neither confirms nor denies the existence of reports nor comments on how they are used. A spokesperson added that SARs are confidential by law, and that breaching that confidentiality risks a "tipping off" offence under the Proceeds of Crime Act — the same statute Reform UK's own complaint invokes BBC. The scale of the SARs regime is worth noting for context: 866,616 cases were flagged through the programme in 2024/25, and the NCA routinely shares SARs information with police forces and other investigating bodies, meaning access to any single report is not confined to NCA staff alone.

The underlying transactions at issue involve George Cottrell, a longstanding ally of Nigel Farage. Tice's company, Tisun Investment, received an £80,000 loan from Cottrell in late 2024, first reported by the Telegraph. Separately, Britain Means Business, a think tank owned by Tice, received a £1 million donation from Cottrell's mother, Fiona, in June 2024. Britain Means Business went on to donate £500,000 to Reform UK that same month, according to Electoral Commission records Electoral Commission. The Sunday Times has also reported that Cottrell provided Farage with support — including security and social media staff — in the year before Farage was elected as an MP.

That last point touches on parliamentary declaration rules. MPs elected for the first time must declare gifts or benefits received in the twelve months before their election if those benefits relate to their parliamentary or political activities; there is an exemption where support is "purely personal". Reform UK has argued Farage was not obliged to declare Cottrell's support on precisely those grounds, framing the arrangement as personal rather than political. The party's position on that point has not been challenged through a formal Commons standards complaint at the time of writing.

Tice sits as the MP for Boston & Skegness. His decision to escalate the SARs matter into a public inquiry demand against the agency responsible for policing financial crime carries an obvious tension: the same law Reform UK cites to allege wrongdoing by the NCA is the law that makes it a criminal offence to disclose the very SARs Tice says were leaked. That circularity is unlikely to be lost on either side of the argument.

Reform UK's broader case rests on inference rather than direct evidence — the party's own account of "likely" NCA origin, set against the NCA's studied non-confirmation, leaves the central factual dispute unresolved for now. Whether the matter proceeds to a police investigation, as Tice has demanded, will depend on whether the NCA or the Home Office are persuaded there are grounds to look beyond the agency's standard confidentiality protections. Given the volume of SARs processed annually and the number of bodies with access to that data, establishing the source of any leak — if one occurred — is unlikely to be straightforward.