“London has gone to hell.” That’s the view of the Norwegian-born shipping magnate John Fredriksen, who has put his extraordinary 300-year-old Chelsea manor, along with its ten suites, ballroom and two-acre garden, up for sale.
The price, £250 million, is a large sum, even for the man who occupies ninth spot on the Rich List. But I hear from an industry insider it had previously been listed for north of £300 million, suggesting Fredriksen is what you might call a “motivated seller”, keen to join the queue of billionaires already lining up to leave the country. The likes of Lakshmi Mittal, Checkout.com founder Guillaume Pousaz and Aston Villa co-owner Nassef Sawiris have all left, or signalled their intention to leave, in recent months.
Just how many of the UK’s wealthiest are leaving is unclear. There are question marks over the accuracy of a report that estimated 16,500 millionaires would leave the UK in 2025, on top of the 9,500 who did last year. Robust-looking research by Bloomberg, which analysed five million Companies House filings, found recently that many UK company directors do appear to be on the move. Directors must list their country of residence on the company filings, and more of them had switched from the UK to somewhere else than at any time in the past four years. The number of departures in April was up 75% from the previous year. But we won’t know exactly how many former non-doms have headed for the exit until HMRC releases official figures in 2027. Judging by the informal soundings I’ve taken from wealth managers, the very richest are the ones most likely to leave.
Anecdotally, their stomping grounds are certainly quieter, as I’ve observed making the rounds for my day-job as the editor of a magazine for ultra-high-net-worth individuals. The capital’s premier private members’ club, 5 Hertford Street, was nearly deserted when I was there last Thursday around noon. I had coffee with a couple of contacts in the tiled courtyard where Leonardo DiCaprio has been known to enjoy a smoke, but we were the only people there. On the way out, I bumped into a friend in real estate, who furrowed his brow as he admitted the market for houses over the £10 million mark was rather slow. At least the property management division of his firm was doing well; it looks after palatial pads for owners who are away.
“A friend in real estate furrowed his brow as he admitted the market for houses over the £10 million mark was rather slow.”
Parts of town can be quiet during the summer, but 5 Hertford Street’s sister club, Oswald’s, which has historically closed its two restaurants in August, has taken the decision to keep at least one of them open throughout the month. The club has been visited by Prince William and Beyoncé, and reportedly counts Lord Rothermere and George Osborne as members, but there are whispers that the decision to eschew its normal summer closure could be an effort to maximise annual takings in a year when many of the club’s wealthiest customers have already started to spend less time in London. (Oswald’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
When a member of the nearby Arts Club called to cancel their membership recently, they were offered the hitherto unthinkable option of freezing it not just for a year, but indefinitely. The member surmises the club was reluctant to part with the £5,000 deposit that it would’ve had to refund. (A spokesperson for the club says the Arts Club had no concerns about membership figures; it is notable, though, that it opened a Dubai outpost in 2020).
In Maison Estelle, the newest of Mayfair’s top-tier members’ clubs, where guests are provided with a sticker to cover the camera on their mobile phone, a member suggested people were so disappointed by the lack of late-night action in other establishments that they were increasingly hosting “crazy house parties” chez eux. They certainly have the homes to show off.
As I strolled along one of west London’s most expensive streets last Friday, scores of construction workers were toiling away at multiple addresses, many on extensive multi-million-pound renovations conceived before Labour’s election victory. I had been invited to see inside one of them: a vast, 9,000 square-foot property that changed hands for around £20 million before being remodelled in a project that will have cost nearly as much again by the time it’s completed. In the “iceberg basement”, there’s a sauna and a 16-metre swimming pool that’s larger and more impressive than those of many five-star hotels.
Despite having invested so heavily in the house, the foreign-born owner, according to his adviser, is likely to join the exodus and move his tax residency from the UK to elsewhere. And it’s been well documented where people like this are going. In Europe, Italy (particularly Milan) and Switzerland have reportedly seen significant inflows of millionaires. The biggest winner globally has been the UAE.
The attraction of low — or even non-existent — tax rates in jurisdictions such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi is obvious, but the UAE have also worked hard to build the infrastructure to lure financial firms. Dubai is home to more than 70 hedge funds, while Brevan Howard and Ray Dalio’s family office are among those to have set up shop in Abu Dhabi.
One London hedgie who’s floated the topic of a move to the Middle East with his wife says that many industry colleagues are having the same difficult conversation. For him, the opportunity to make more money and pay less tax is highly attractive, but his wife is reluctant to move so far from her family and friends. Eventually they agreed to put an 18-month limit on their time in the UAE, if they end up going, after which they will either move back to the UK or go somewhere else.
Marital push-and-pull is a universal of domestic life. However, in some respects, the very rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, remain very different from you and me.
There are 3,028 billionaires in the world, collectively worth more than $16 trillion. But there are almost 10 times as many people (nearly enough to fill Lord’s cricket ground) who have more than $100 million — the kind of money that enables you to do whatever you want for the rest of your life. And I’d wager that few of these people think about their “home” in the same way as you or me. Or, crucially, the way that Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and certain Left-leaning academics think they ought.
Often, they own several properties scattered around the world (or around the US, if they’re American) and split their time between them, moulding work and family life around an itinerant existence. On top of this, they’re likely to travel extensively for both business and pleasure. If they have grown-up children, as they often do, each one might have been educated in a couple of different countries before working in a third and marrying a partner from a fourth. When you ask someone like this, “Where’s home?”, it’s tricky for them to give a simple answer.
As a consequence, many of those described in mainstream press coverage as “leaving the country” will not really leave in the way most people understand. They will merely change their tax residency via a formal process. In practical terms, that means being subject to a limit of 90 days per year in the UK, which might be fewer than before. Most will keep hold of their UK property assets, perhaps running them less like a main residence and more like a pied-à-terre.
So they will still be here, just slightly less often. Spending less money, investing less in British businesses, relying less on UK-headquartered law firms and our other world-leading professional services and advisory firms. And, of course, contributing less to the UK exchequer. The average non-dom paid £144,578 in tax and National Insurance contributions in the tax year ending in 2024. Analysis from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) shows that if more than a quarter of them were to leave, the net result would be less money for the public purse.
Truth be told, the worm had started to turn before Labour got in. When Jeremy Hunt announced in March 2024 that a Conservative government would abolish the non-dom regime, he thought it was a manoeuvre worthy of Sun Tzu. It now looks less wise.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves upped the ante by revealing that former non-doms who’d been resident in the UK for 10 consecutive years before their death could find their worldwide assets subjected to the UK’s 40% rate of inheritance tax, one of the highest in the world. That was the real kicker.
Recent rumours this policy could be revisited have not merely grown quieter; they’ve been drowned out by talk of an additional wealth tax, which the Chancellor refused to rule out last week. (In August 2023, she had ruled it out.)
As the relative economic importance of countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa continues to grow, perhaps it’s inevitable London will lose some of its force as a magnet for the world’s wealthiest people. Will we miss them when they’re gone?
