From 2014 to 2023, CIFF funneled more than $553 million into nearly 40 U.S.-based groups to push DEI and radical environmentalist policies.
At first blush, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation looks like an uncontroversial philanthropic organization whose mission is to promote children’s health, prevent HIV, and fight climate change.
But a review of tax records, nonprofit reports, and the group’s geopolitical ties suggests that the foundation is not what it seems. Over the past decade, the organization — founded by British billionaire and activist hedge fund manager Christopher Hohn — has funneled more than half a billion dollars into U.S. activist organizations as part of a broader effort to push radical climate and DEI policy on U.S. soil. CIFF also has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, raising questions about the motive behind Hohn’s decade-long philanthropic influence campaign in the American nonprofit and policy world.
Between 2014 and 2023, CIFF poured more than $553 million into nearly 40 U.S.-based groups as part of a broader scheme to push DEI and radical environmentalist policies in America, according to a new report compiled by Americans for Public Trust (APT), a nonpartisan watchdog group that investigates nonprofit malfeasance.
U.S. laws prohibit foreign nationals from contributing to American political candidates and influencing U.S. elections. And yet Hohn’s multimillion-dollar effort to bankroll CIFF’s contributions to a web of left-wing groups demonstrates how foreign nationals use financial loopholes to push their own ideological agendas on U.S. soil to get around the Foreign Agents Registration Act’s financial disclosure requirements for foreign entities and individuals.
“Because there is little oversight and few restrictions on foreign giving to U.S.-based organizations, Hohn’s actions via CIFF are extremely questionable and murky,” reads the report from APT, shared first with National Review. “More investigations both on the state and federal levels are needed to determine to what extent any foreign giving laws and regulations may have been violated by Hohn and CIFF.”
Over the past decade, Republican discourse surrounding left-wing dark money groups has revolved around liberal billionaire and conservative bogeyman George Soros. But in recent years, watchdog groups have sought to uncover and publicize how this vast network of liberal dark money groups extends well beyond the Soros family to include foreign donors such as Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss and Hohn, whose affiliated organizations have contributed millions in recent years to groups associated with the liberal dark money behemoth Arabella Advisors.
The Arabella network has come under fire in recent years for its success in anonymizing left-wing billionaires’ contributions to an array of progressive causes, many of them pop-up groups with vague climate- and social-justice-oriented titles to deliberately obscure mega-donors’ clandestine efforts to bankroll left-wing lobbying efforts and political activism.
A Hedge Fund for the Children
The son of a Jamaican car mechanic and a native of Surrey, England, Christopher Hohn attended the University of Southampton before traveling to America to attend Harvard Business School. After a stint working for a range of private financial firms including Perry Capital, he co-founded the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation in 2002 with his ex-wife, Jamie Cooper-Hohn. In 2003, he founded the London-based hedge fund, The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI). He was knighted in 2014 for his philanthropic work.
While TCI and CIFF’s contractual link ended in 2012 ahead of the couple’s divorce, the billionaire and his activist hedge fund still make charitable contributions to CIFF, and Hohn still serves as the chairman of the organization’s board of trustees. In 2024, Hohn contributed $328 million to CIFF. Forbes currently pegs his net worth at $9.2 billion. And as of June, TCI had roughly $60 billion in assets, including stakes in General Electric, Microsoft, and Visa. It’s unclear exactly how much of Hohn’s net worth came from CIFF proceeds, though he set it up in 2003 and has not worked anywhere else since.
TCI and CIFF did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.
Hohn has a long history of contributing to far-left groups, often through CIFF. He is one of the highest-profile contributors to the extremist climate group Extinction Rebellion, also known as XR. The radical environmentalist group has come under fire in recent years for disruptive U.S.-based protests — some of which have resulted in arrests — as well as its explicit agitation for “rebellion against the U.S. government for its criminal inaction on the ecological crisis.”
Hohn and CIFF have contributed to the group. “I am a personal funder of Extinction Rebellion. I recently gave them £50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact,” he told the Telegraph in 2019.
And yet Hohn’s radical climate environmentalism conflicts with his firm’s extensive investments in fossil-fuel-dependent assets. Despite Hohn’s charitable contributions to a web of left-wing environmental organizations dedicated to combating the climate crisis, TCI has longtime financial ties to airline and helicopter manufacturer Airbus, a recent RealClearPolitics investigation revealed. The hedge fund also has a history of multimillion-dollar stakes in Coal India Ltd., a state-controlled coal-mining company, along with a Spanish company that own Heathrow Airport.
According to APT’s report, CIFF has contributed more than $11 million since 2016 to the New Venture Fund and the Windward Fund. Both of those groups have ties to the dark money Arabella network.
CIFF has contributed to an array of other left-wing groups, lobbying funds, and nonprofits, including C40 Cities Climate Leadership group, The Sunrise Project, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, ClimateWorks Foundation, Ceres, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, the World Resources Institute, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
CIFF’s CCP Ties
The Hohn-founded CIFF has also established itself as an ally of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), nonprofit disclosures and social media posts uncovered by APT show. A since-deleted post on X shows CIFF CEO Kate Hampton speaking at the CCP’s International Green Development Coalition in 2019, characterizing the controversial Belt and Road Initiative’s (BRI) shift from “brown to green” as an “essential” step in combating climate change. The BRI is viewed by the U.S. and its allies as an insidious global infrastructure development scheme by Beijing to project soft power around the world.
And yet CIFF’s vast ties to the CCP-created BRI’s climate initiatives suggest the British nonprofit’s founders and investors view the project as worthwhile. Hampton is a member of the CCP-aligned China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development and is a 2024 recipient of the “Friendship Award,” an honor bestowed by the Chinese government on foreigners who contribute to Beijing’s development in an array of sectors.
The Hohn-founded philanthropic organization is tied to a web of CCP-aligned organizations that are nominally aimed at promoting Beijing’s transition to green energy. “The British nonprofit has given millions to various organizations directly under the auspices of the Chinese government, including the National Renewable Energy Center, the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Centre (FECO), and Tsinghua University, which conduct energy and military research,” APT’s report reads. “CIFF is also a member of the donor steering committee for the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT), which works in China to promote climate action. ICAT’s final report on a workshop in China was supported by CIFF, with numerous CCP officials contributing to its creation.”
CIFF has also contributed to the Beijing-based group Energy Foundation China, a CCP-aligned left-wing organization that promotes anti-fossil-fuel advocacy in the U.S. In recent years, GOP lawmakers have raised concerns that its advocacy is aimed at promoting Chinese energy dominance. CIFF has also funneled money into the Rocky Mountain Institute, a CCP-connected climate group that promotes policies aimed at phasing out gas stoves in the U.S.