The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced in his spring budget that the government was going to scrap the “non-domicile” regime, which has allowed the multi-millionaire Bassim Haidar and 68,800 other non-doms to avoid paying UK tax on their overseas income for the past 225 years. It will raise £2.7bn a year.
The Guardian’s wealth correspondent, Rupert Neate tells Hannah Moore about interviewing Haidar over his decision to leave the UK because of the end of the non-dom regime. From next year, people can avoid taxes only in the first four years of residency in the UK, compared with the previous 15-year threshold.
Haidar has formed a working group of 29 non-doms, who mostly planned to leave the UK before September because of the ‘punitive’ tax changes. Ending the break is self-defeating, Haidar believes, because the total UK tax take will fall amid an exodus of the super-rich.
Arun Advani, an associate professor in the economics department at the University of Warwick and an expert in tax and inequality, explains the changes and tells Moore why the data suggests the vast majority of non-doms won’t actually leave the UK.
Photograph: BH Holdings
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