Extinction Rebellion billionaire financier ‘donates £46 million’ to Sadiq Khan’s climate network

• Sir Christopher Hohn is said to be ‘strategic funder’ of a climate campaign group

A UK billionaire who is a major funder of Extinction Rebellion has allegedly donated £46 million in Sadiq Khan’s climate schemes. 

Sir Christopher Hohn is the managing partner and portfolio director of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which has reportedly donated significant sums of money to the C40 Cities network.

The C40 Cities group, which is chaired by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, is made up of almost 100 mayors around the world that are ‘united in action to confront the climate crisis’, according to its website.

In the last decade the CIFF has given nearly $57 million (£46 million) in grants to C40 cities, with Sir Christopher said to be a ‘strategic funder’ of the organisation, according to The Telegraph.

This represents around 14% of the overall $827 million (£675 million) that the CIFF has donated to climate related causes since 2013, the newspaper claims. 

Sir Christopher Hohn (pictured) who is a major funder of Extinction Rebellion has allegedly donated £46 million in Sadiq Khan ‘s climate schemes

The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which Sir Christopher is the managing partner and managing director of, has reportedly donated significant sums of money to the C40 Cities network which is chaired by Sadiq Khan (pictured)

Activists from Just Stop Oil block traffic in Westmnister, central London on October 30

The Telegraph reported that the group has funded ‘a number of’ projects that have involved the London Mayor’s Office, including Breathe London, a network of air sensors across the capital which are designed to monitor air pollution. 

CIFF has also allegedly donated more than £17 million to the Clean Air Fund, a philanthropic organisation set up to tackle air pollutuon around the world.

The funding details have been revealed in a report on the Clean Air campaign, which has reportedly been seen by The Telegraph. 

It suggests that ‘seemingly localist civil society organisations’ are funded by billionaires and there ‘are no grassroots air pollution campaigns of consequence’.

It also alleges that ‘grants from fewer than 10 philanthropic foundations account for well in excess of a billion dollars of climate grant making per year’. 

The report’s author Ben Pile said there donations to climate campaign groups are shared between each other in a ‘money-go-round’, with the sources of funding for the groups often unclear. 

He added: ‘Policies such as the Ulez should be driven by the public, not by billionaires whose interests have not been properly explored.’

The report’s authors said: ‘The public must be at the centre of political decision-making across all policy domains.

‘Though air pollution policies may seem to have been driven by grassroots campaigns and scientific evidence, we have investigated these organisations and found that they are in fact almost exclusively supported by a small number of philanthropic foundations that are active in climate change lobbying, which have made air quality a proxy issue for the same agenda.

‘The public has simply not been consulted, much less been free to participate in discussion about or vote on important questions.’

In the last decade the CIFF has given nearly $57 million (£46 million) in grants to C40 cities, with Sir Christopher (pictured) said to be a ‘strategic funder’ of the organisation

In 2019, it emerged that Sir Christopher, who is usually somewhat reclusive, donated £200,000 to climate activist group Extinction Rebellion through his charity and his own personal wealth, after claiming there was an ‘urgent need’ for people to wake up to climate change.

Around £50,000 of the donation came from his own pocket, while the rest came from his charity.

He also faced criticism over the 2005 derailing of Deutsche Börse’s bid for the London stock exchange, which he was said to have played a part in.

His London-based hedge fund TCI’s ultimate parent company is in the Cayman Islands – a well known tax haven.

The Surrey-born financier, who was ranked as the 125th-richest person in the UK with a £1.2bn personal fortune on the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, has also slammed investment giants for acting ‘like sheep’ on climate change.

The billionaire, who was knighted in 2014 for his philanthropy, wrote to seven of the world’s biggest asset managers urging them to step up their efforts to force companies to become more environmentally friendly.

In the letter, sent through his charity the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Sir Hohn accused ‘most asset managers’ of ‘total greenwash’.

He later told The Financial Times: ‘The asset management industry is a joke in respect to what they are actually doing [around climate change]. They talk but they don’t actually do anything effective. Asset managers are sheep.’

A spokesman for C40 Cities said it is ‘driven by a steering committee of mayors from across the globe which provides strategic oversight to ensure C40’s mission and mandate are directly driven by and responsive to the needs of C40 cities’. 

MailOnline has contacted the London Mayor’s Office and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation for comment. 

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