The high-profile non-doms that have quit Britain since the Budget
If the pleas of wealth advisers and tax lawyers are to be believed, since the Chancellor’s Autumn fiscal crackdown, non-doms have been leaving Britain in droves. We’ve listed the most high-profile departures since the Budget.
Having made it almost exactly halfway through her maiden Budget, the UK’s first female Chancellor was beginning to find her stride.
Referencing the fabled £22bn black hole she had exposed a few months earlier, Rachel Reeves had successfully navigated the Budget’s two most painful tax hikes, the £20bn uplift in employer national insurance contributions and the politically toxic changes to farming inheritance tax.
By comparison, the next revenue-raiser she had to confirm – abolishing an arcane tax status known as the ‘non-dom’ regime – was trifling. After all, unlike the employer national insurance or inheritance tax hikes, scrapping the 200-year-old tax bracket had featured in the party’s manifesto that had won it a historic landslide just months earlier.
“I have always said that if you make Britain your home, you should pay your tax here,” she told a lively House of Commons. “So today, I can confirm we will abolish the non-dom tax regime, and remove the outdated concept of domicile from the tax system from April 2025.”
But no sooner had the Chancellor confirmed she would go ahead with the heavily trailed move, and a storm of campaigners, lawyers and wealth advisers erupted in chorus to warn of its foolishness.
Non-doms flee the UK
Speaking to City AM a day after the Budget, James Quarmby, founding partner of Stephenson Harwood’s private wealth team, branded it “monumentally stupid“, adding that several of his non-dom clients had already made plans to leave.
Meanwhile, David Lesperance, of wealth advisory Lesperance & Associates, said he’d had five people ask him to respond to the policy within 24 hours of Reeves’ speech, which he called a “nightmare from number 11 Downing Street”.
The majority of objections coalesced around one theme: that the international investor class, which tended to take up non-dom status, would leave Britain in response to the change. Thus, the Exchequer would lose out on the income tax, capital gains tax and various property taxes they had previously been paying altogether.
Indeed, a study conducted by Oxford Economics in the run-up to the autumn found that, far from raising revenue, ploughing ahead with scrapping the non-dom regime would cost the Exchequer north of £1bn.
And despite prior peer-reviewed studies suggesting that the actual number of departures would be slim, the ensuing months have been punctuated by news of non-doms warning they would leave, followed by those threats being carried out.
A recent study from former Treasury economist Chris Walker, estimated that at least a 10th of the wealthy foreigners who claim – or have previously claimed – the status left the UK in 2024. Moreover, Walker precludes the months leading up to April this year, when the changes came into force and when, anecdotally, advisers have reported a further ramping up of departures.
All the while, there has been a drip feed of high-profile departees emerging since the fateful decision to plough on with the plan in her maiden Budget, which City AM has dutifully charted:
Richard Gnodde, Goldman Sachs International vice chairman – left
City AM revealed in April that Richard Gnodde had quit Britain for Milan, an increasingly popular bolthole for wealthy foreigners thanks to its flat tax regime.
Two sources said that Gnodde, one of Goldman Sachs’ longest-serving and most celebrated investment bankers, had become a user of Italy’s equivalent of the non-dom status. Under the scheme, foreigners can pay a blanket rate of €200,000 for the right to be tax resident in Italy, and not taxed on any of their non-regime.
Originally from South Africa, his departure from London marked the end of a glittering career at Goldman’s City outpost, which began in 1987 when the office had a headcount of little more than a dozen.
He went on to become Goldman Sachs International’s chief executive until earlier this year, a post which he held jointly from 2006 and then independently from 2016.
Gnodde lived in London long enough to no longer qualify for non-dom status, which before it was abolished expired after 14 years a claimant first moved to the UK. H
owever, as part of the same fiscal crackdown, Reeves also tightened the rules around foreign trusts owned by former non-dom regime users, bringing them under the purview of the Treasury. This made the trust liable to UK taxes, including inheritance tax.
A spokesman for the bank said that Gnodde would continue to work at the bank’s Milan office, where he would focus on “growth opportunities for the firm across Europe”.
Lakshmi Mittal, former chief executive, Arcelormittal
Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal was the first high-profile instance of one of the UK’s 74,000 non-doms publicly leaving the UK.
In March, it emerged that Mittal – a major Labour donor under Tony Blair’s premiership – was preparing to leave Britain within months.
A friend of the British-Indian told the Financial Times that he was “exploring his options” with the most likely option being that he “cease to be a UK tax resident”.
With an estimated fortune just shy of £15bn, Mittal was one of the UK’s most prominent businessmen, coming seventh in the Sunday Times’ annual ‘rich list’ in 2024. He built his eponymous metals conglomerate that is now the world’s second-largest steel producer from next to nothing.
Nassef Sawiris, co-owner of Aston Villa football club
Nassef Sawiris’ departure was confirmed by Bloomberg News last month. Sawiris is the co-owner of Premier League football club Aston Villa and Egypt’s richest person, with a fortune estimated to be worth £7bn.
He, along with his two brothers, inherited the Orascom conglomerate, which was founded in the 1980s.
He now runs OCI NV, an Amsterdam-based chemicals group, and, as well as his stake in Aston Villa, is one of the largest shareholders in Adidas and Madison Square Gardens.
He first laid down roots in London in 2016, relocating his multi-billion-dollar family office to the West End and setting up a charitable foundation two years later.
However, after relocating his family office to the United Arab Emirates, Sawiris took advantage of Italy’s flat-tax regime, as revealed by Bloomberg in April, following a change in his residence on tax filings.
Magda Wierzycka, co-founder of Sygnia Asset Management
The story of Magda Wierzycka’s journey to London is a remarkable one.
Born in Poland, she fled her native country as a child under the cover of night with her family to grow up in South Africa. There, she attended the University of Cape Town, shortly after which she established Sygnia, one of South Africa’s largest investment firms.
She went on to become her adopted country’s only self-made female billionaire and one of the richest women in Africa. But she then moved to the UK abruptly, having helped topple South Africa’s then-President, Jacob Zuma, by releasing a cache of papers showing corruption at the top of his government.
In the UK, she became one of the country’s many non-doms and set up Braavos, a venture capital fund investing in life sciences start-ups, the majority of which had been spun out of Oxford University.
But despite her considerable financial ties to Britain and a minor concession announced by Rachel Reeves at Davos, she told City AM in January she still planned to return to South Africa, saying: “Why would I put any more money into the UK? Money which has already been taxed in South Africa, in order for it to be taxed some more, if I’m still going to leave?”
City AM understands she is still in the UK, but intends to leave in the coming months.
Guillaume Pousaz, founder of Checkout.com
Worth a reported £6bn, Guillaume Pousaz is the most recent wealthy foreigner to have joined the exodus of non-doms from Britain.
He founded London fintech darling Checkout.com in 2012. It quickly rose to unicorn status, and now employs hundreds of staff in its UK headquarters, and a purported 1,700 globally.
First reported from Companies House filings by the Daily Telegraph, Pousaz chose the tax haven of Monaco as his new residence. Neither Checkout.com nor Pousaz’s family office commented on the ramifications of his relocation on his firm or its London staff.
Ann Kaplan Muholland, founder of iFinance and ‘Real Housewife of Toronto’
Ann Kaplan Mulholland is not an archetypal non-dom. A former ‘Real Housewife of Toronto’ and star of a reality TV show that documents the trials and tribulations of owning a multimillion-pound castle in Kent.
But along with her husband, cosmetic surgery entrepreneur Stephen, she is a ‘centimillionaire’ and a successful founder in her own right. She founded several start-ups before moving to the UK, including the small loans business in iFinance, which grew to become one of Canada’s largest consumer finance firms.
But, like Gnodde and Sawriris, she is planning to move to Milan next year, when her allotted four years of the non-dom scheme’s replacement – known as the Temporary Repatriation Facility – will conclude.
Speaking to City AM in February, she said: “We can’t stay we have too many businesses worldwide, and there’s no way we’re paying inheritance tax or having our kids taxed – that’s a lot of money. So we’re moving to Italy.”