Unpacking The Reform Donations Hoax

‘For more, we’re joined by Lawrence Carter, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting. He is joining us via audio only from the West Midlands in the U.K. because he’s an undercover journalist and needs to remain anonymous for his work,’ so sayeth Amy Goodman on a 2023 video podcast broadcast by Democracy Now!

While profiles for journalists are sometimes kept private due to security concerns associated with their undercover work, Carter’s rises above the parapet following his recent spoiler published in advance of this year’s Reform UK party conference.

Based upon hoax donations and secret filming carried out by Mr Carter and fellow travellers, Tom Costello and Louis Wilson, the resulting furore meant Reform’s policies stayed out of the headlines. Replaced with allegations of illegal foreign funding, that saw Reform UK officials Dan Jukes and James Orr being forced to step down.

Carter and Costello are investigative journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR). They have spent years working together as an undercover duo, often posing as wealthy corporate figures or donors to film hidden-camera stings.

Costello serves as the secondary support lead, working on hidden-camera setups and scripts to ensure targets believe fake identities. He also has a profile on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism website. Referenced articles date back to 2012 and, rather than being investigative in themselves, tend to summarise left-wing pieces published elsewhere by other authors.

As for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism – in a pattern that we shall see repeated – it is funded by civil society/left-wing/progressive foundation donors. Many of whom, such as the European AI & Society Fund, Limelight Foundation, Oak Foundation and the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, have direct connections to George Soros and Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

As a young, discreet investigative journalist, Costello keeps his personal details private to protect the integrity of his undercover operations, especially when creating hoax corporate fronts, as with the Reform UK overseas donations hoax.

Likewise, Carter. However, despite being the senior operator in CCR (and, as we shall see, numerous associated offshoots), he is less than 100% discreet. Allowing, therefore, a window to inch open, offering a glimpse into his interesting and sinister world.

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Born in North Wales in 1984, Lawrence Aidan Carter later uses an address just across the border in England in official documentation. Readers will be unsurprised to read that, as with many a left-wing environmentalist, the 44-year-old lives rather well and consumes perhaps more than his fair share of natural resources.

His given address is a £500,000 property in a Midlands county town. Although camera- and biography-shy, thanks to the miracle of modern technology (and without having to don disguises or perform any secret filming), the G-P investigative team have been able to look round his house.

Those who understand the property market inform of a considerable family home sitting in a charming street in a sought-after area. The stylish house blends period character with modern luxury and is minutes from riverside walks, boutique shops and eateries. Not only a home full of soul, style, and heritage – unmatched for lifestyle and charm – the location is unbeatable.

However, Puffins will be horrified to read that Mr Carter is, quite literally, guilty of astroturfing. Meant to mean nothing worse than corporations faking their self-interest to mimic environmental concern, photographic evidence suggests that Lawrence covered the back garden in concrete, then carpeted it in bright green artificial plastic grass.

Disconcerting since, as a young man, Carter was a Greenpeace activist, described in March 2013 as an ‘energy campaigner’ while speaking in opposition to UK fracking.By 2014, he’d been promoted to the Greenpeace press office in what was to become Greenpeace Unearthed – a media relations effort to counter what Greenpeace claimed to be ‘climate obstruction’ and corporate lobbying against the green agenda.

According to his LinkedIn profile. Carter was a senior investigative reporter at Greenpeace Unearthed between 2015 and 2022. From 2020 to 2022, his duties included those of a special projects editor. During those seven years with Unearthed, it became an award-winning environmental journalism outlet. His reporting on corporate lobbying and climate obstruction being amplified across the world by The New York Times, the BBC, and The Guardian.

In 2021, Carter went undercover and filmed an ExxonMobil lobbyist admitting that the company fought US climate legislation behind the scenes. This footage sparked two major US Congressional inquiries. We shall return to the ExxonMobil sting later, but for the time being, it is sufficient to say that the year following the ExxonMobil sting, Carter left Greenpeace to found a journalistic enterprise of his own.

In the Amy Goodman interview, he explained:

‘In my previous role at Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative journalism project, I had a lot of what I wanted from a job. But although Greenpeace is international, Unearthed was still hosted by Greenpeace UK, so I didn’t have much geographic freedom. I felt there probably was a role for a new organisation to invest in very long-lead, impact climate reporting, on a global scale.

‘I was quite lucky, because in seven years at Unearthed I’d built up a track record of stories with a fair amount of impact, and I also had a good sense of the philanthropic organisations that might be interested in funding us.’

Greenpeace Unearthed’s ‘philanthropic organisation’ donors being the same leftist progressive globalist foundations who fund the likes of The Bureau of International Journalism and, come to think of it, Democracy Now!

This new enterprise is the Centre for Climate Reporting, whose website rather grandly states:

‘To ensure that these stories reach as wide an audience as possible, we partner and collaborate with the world’s most respected media organisations. We report without fear or favour and are committed to rigorous, fair, public interest journalism.

‘The Centre for Climate Reporting is strictly editorially independent. We are committed to working with integrity and fairness to uncover wrongdoing. If you want to fund our work, we accept donations of all sizes and are grateful for any support. Our independent journalism is 100% funded by grants and donations.’

A link is kindly provided allowing the website visitor to send money.

Note the rather elastic use of the word ‘we’. In fact, successive annual company submissions, from CCR’s foundation until the most recent, show the average number of employees at CCR to be: one. In other words, Carter is a glorified hobbyist, albeit a well-funded one. Within a year of its founding, documents lodged at Companies House show the one-man band has a quarter million pounds at the bank.

Far from being independent, Carter is beholden to the small number of organisations donating these funds. They include the European Climate Foundation, Meliore Foundation, Swiss Philanthropy Foundation and a fund administered through Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. In other words, the usual predictable leftist globalist progressive axis.

Also, the KR Foundation, from which CCR received a three million Danish Kroner grant. An example, perhaps, of overseas funding influencing a British organisation? As an aside, and as a window into the mentality of these people, the Kann Rasmussen Foundation aims to ‘capture’ 5.6 million tonnes of CO2 – which equals the late K Rasmussen’s emissions from his double glazing factory since 1941. Quite.

In January 2023, CRR’s registered office changes to a Suffolk convenience address close to the US Air Force base at Mildenhall. The proprietors claim customers can use the address as their business address, and offers virtual-office packages from around £9-£13 per month. Mail is received and forwarded on the customer’s behalf.

Later in 2023, in another spoiler, this time in anticipation of the December COP28 conference to be held in Dubai City, documents were ‘obtained’ by Carter’s CCR while, according to the Corporation’s website, ‘working alongside the BBC’. These had been prepared by the UAE’s COP28 team in anticipation of meetings with at least 27 foreign governments ahead of the summit. The crux being that the United Arab Emirates and COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber planned to use the UAE’s role as the host of UN climate talks as an opportunity to strike oil and gas deals.

Indeed, the CRR website does state their cross-border investigations are designed to hold ‘powerful forces to account’ and track how they build and wield political power. Primary targets being multinational corporations (specifically fossil fuel and energy giants), petrostates and high-net-worth individuals.

However, in January 2025, Carter sets up another company, the interesting Global Journalism Ltd – tellingly a moniker that makes no mention of the environment. At this point, Carter’s one-man band hobbyist journalism takes a sinister and overtly party-political turn.

To be continued tomorrow…
 

© Always Worth Saying 2026