Candy cash saga
Nick Candy , Issue 1668 FOR a man brought in by Nigel Farage as Reform UK's treasurer, charged with raising an election-winning war chest, Nick Candy's own commercial prowess is increasingly hard to discern.

The property development for which he is generally known is kept from public view through offshore companies that don't file UK accounts (and it's worth remembering that on his biggest deal – One Hyde Park, with brother Christian – he was accused of claiming tax-efficiently not to be a developer, so the big profits could stay offshore).

A little more can be seen, however, of Nick's forays outside property and into the world of start-ups. And latest results suggest it's all draining his finances a fair bit.

World of Lux
Candy operates this side of his business through operations known as Candy Capital and Candy Ventures. His UK company Candy Capital Ltd lends money to another UK company, Candy Ventures Ltd, which in turn passes funds on to the Luxembourg company that holds his stakes in a dozen active start-up companies, Candy Ventures SARL. The latter is 90 percent owned by Candy, 10 percent by his accountant and tax expert, Steven Smith.

Out of the 12 start-ups, ten made losses in the most recent period for which results can be seen. These included a £7.8m loss in 2024 for gambling company Betconnect Ltd, in which Candy Ventures holds a 46 percent stake, and a $5.5m loss for data management company Hanzo Archives (22 percent stake).

The only significant bright spot was podcast platform Audioboom, which in 2024 finally turned a small profit.

Previous Candy investments haven't fared much better. Augmented-reality business Blippar went bust in 2018 (a reincarnated version, Blippar 2.0, continues to lose money: £1.65m in 2024). Then social media company Aaqua went belly-up, with a court last year finding that Candy had been fraudulently persuaded to invest by its founder Robert Bonnier.

Loss leader
Unsurprisingly, Candy's Luxembourg company is sitting on €116m of accumulated losses, made up largely of hits it has taken on bust businesses and not taking into account the roughly £30m positive valuation of the Audioboom stake. The losses could be turned around if the other investments take off, but recent history suggests nobody should bank on that.

These investments are eating into Candy's personal reserves. In 2024, the latest year for which figures are available, he had to pour a further £19m into the top of this funnel, taking his total loans to Candy Capital Ltd to £51.5m.

Back in his comfort zone of property investment, Candy sees the United Arab Emirates (also the destination of Farage's freebie to a Formula One Grand Prix courtesy of UAE state coffers) as his next goldmine, through a joint venture deal with the Dubai World Trade Centre. The plan must be for this to fill the holes in his leaky start-up bucket.

Candy Capital Ltd's other active holding, apart from the Candy Ventures setup, is a company called 49 UBS Ltd. This is the Guernsey company that owns Candy's £13m Mayfair office at 49 Upper Brook Street – to where, oddly enough, Farage last week moved the registered office of the company through which he collects earnings on his many side-hustles, Thorn in the Side Ltd. Nothing says "man of the people" more than running the grift through Mayfair!

Hyde bound
Meanwhile, has Candy suddenly given his tax game away via an email lurking in the bowels of the Epstein files?

In January 2005 Candy was in touch with someone who appears to have been a friend of Ghislaine Maxwell, discussing the possibility of meeting up. "I am now less hectic as I closed on our deal and we bought one of the best buildings in London at the end of Sloane Street in Knightsbridge," he writes.

"We" bought? This was One Hyde Park, the development which Nick Candy has insisted – including in a court case in 2017 – was done by his brother Christian's offshore company while, in the UK, Nick merely provided design and marketing services as it was turned into apartments flogged for eight figure prices.

Now his own words from the time seem to contradict this. Awkward!