Christen Ager-Hanssen was in Mallorca conducting an espionage operation when the email from Conservative party headquarters arrived. “Thank you for indicating you would like to attend our private dinner with Suella Braverman,” a party official wrote to the Norwegian businessman last September. “It promises to be a great evening.” As home secretary at the time, Braverman held one of the most senior positions in the UK’s security apparatus, overseeing the police and MI5. Ager-Hanssen has boasted in media interviews of using veterans of the CIA, the Mossad and MI6 in the operations he carries out. The services he has said he offers to his clients, who are said to include “eccentric billionaires”, run from covert surveillance to “social engineering” and “infiltration”. To gain access to the top of the British government, he appears to have arranged something simpler: cash. In July 2023, three months before the Braverman dinner, the Tories received a £70,000 donation from nChain, a cryptocurrency and software venture of which Ager-Hanssen was chief executive. Now, as well as questions about what checks the Tories conducted on a man once described as a “mercenary”, there are also doubts about the donation. The company Ager-Hanssen ran required the approval of its shareholders to make a donation. And the company says this was not given. Following revelations about payments from Russia and elsewhere that have flowed into the Tories’ election war chest, questions about the nChain donation add to concerns that the money that shapes British politics receives little scrutiny.
‘Data nerds and intelligence officers’ For Ager-Hanssen, being named nChain’s boss in November 2022 was a return to prominence after a chequered career. He went bust in the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. Creditors pursued him for millions, among them Barclays. Now 61, he calls himself a “street fighter” – in contrast to the masses who waft on life’s currents, he says, like jellyfish. “If people screw with me I will screw them 10 times harder,” he once declared. “I’m a crazy motherfucker.” In 2014, Ager-Hanssen recounted how a Swedish banking tycoon had hired him to battle fraud charges. He said in a press interview that the staff he had assembled for such tasks included “data nerds, finance nerds and former intelligence officers from the CIA, MI6 and [the] Mossad”, the US, UK and Israeli foreign intelligence agencies. Among his tactics, he revealed, was attending meetings with the other side’s lawyer wearing a hidden microphone. It was another sting that led him to the top job at nChain. Using a former Mossad operative posing as an Argentinian businessman, Ager-Hanssen secretly filmed an American lawyer, Kyle Roche, making unguarded comments about his clients. When the videos appeared online, Roche’s reputation was damaged. According to an account Ager-Hanssen later gave to a Norwegian newspaper, he orchestrated the takedown of Roche. That appears to have endeared him to nChain because Roche had led a high-profile lawsuit for some of the company’s adversaries in the cryptocurrency world. Shortly after the Roche sting, Ager-Hanssen was appointed nChain’s chief executive. Soon he made another useful connection. On 29 June 2023, Ager-Hanssen “had the pleasure of talking to” Rishi Sunak, according to a post on X, then called Twitter. That was the day the prime minister attended a big Conservative summer fundraiser. The party would not say whether Ager-Hanssen had been there. The same day, emails seen by the Guardian show, Ager-Hanssen proposed to party officials the idea of a mobile app that he said would make the Tories millions by letting brands such as Amazon and Coca-Cola sell directly to party members. Senior Conservative officials were enthused. They wanted the “True Blue” app ready to go by October’s party conference. As they were discussing the project with Ager-Hanssen, the £70,000 donation arrived from nChain. But soon Ager-Hanssen was embarking on yet another covert operation – against nChain itself.
According to his own account in the Norwegian press, on 11 September Ager-Hanssen flew to Mallorca with a hidden recorder to gather dirt from an associate of one of nChain’s backers. At 2.26pm, a Tory official emailed with details of the evening with Braverman, which was taking place two days later. “The dinner is being kindly hosted by Alan Howard, a key supporter of the Party at his wonderful home,” the official said – the home being a four-storey, Grade-II listed house in central London. Howard, a hedge fund billionaire who hired Lady Gaga to sing at his wedding, has donated £1.8m. Braverman was “invited by the party and went to the event”, a person close to her said. ‘Serious and inappropriate’ The Tories did not respond to questions about what, if any, checks were done on Ager-Hanssen before he was granted access to a senior minister. They did not dispute that he attended the dinner. Days later, Ager-Hanssen went public with the results of his operation against nChain. He challenged the company’s claim to be making technology created by the mysterious inventor of cryptocurrency. On 30 September, nChain issued a statement saying Ager-Hanssen had been fired after he had “conducted himself in a serious and inappropriate manner”. An nChain representative told the Guardian it had only learned of the £70,000 donation to the Conservatives after Ager-Hanssen had been dismissed. It appeared that it was Ager-Hanssen, the representative claimed, who had ordered the payment. There was “no board or shareholder approval of this donation”, meaning it does not appear to have complied with provisions in the Companies Act covering corporate donations. Ager-Hanssen has not responded to multiple requests for comment from the Guardian. A Conservative party spokesperson said the True Blue app project was dead. Asked about the donation, the spokesperson said: “Those would be questions for the company, as it relates to the Companies Act.” There have been no more donations from nChain, nor any in Ager-Hanssen’s name. But as of early April, the first thing mentioned on Ager-Hanssen’s X profile is “The Conservative Party”.