Millionaire exodus did not occur, study reveals | Tax Justice Network
Posted by Council_estate_kid25
Millionaire exodus did not occur, study reveals | Tax Justice Network
Posted by Council_estate_kid25
27 Comments
And just like the bedbugs of Paris last year — any opportunity to fuel the flames of a cynical story is utterly whipped up into a forest fire, because everybody is so fucking miserable online at the moment.
They’ve been threatening the same thing each time there was a Labour govt and/or a bill passed they didn’t like since I was in fucking nappies.
Why don’t they do it? Easy answer is Europe is taxed more, America is a ideological mess and the UK (despite everyone online *CONSTANTLY WHINGING OTHERWISE*) is actually a pretty fucking nice place to live.
Of course it didn’t. Where could they fly off to that’s better than here?
It’s a disagreement over definition. Is a millionaire someone with investable assets of more than £1m or someone with total assets over £1m? In other words, does it include people who bought a house before the housing crisis really set in but are otherwise not wealthy.
Many have tried to live in Saudi Arabia, but it turns out it’s a bit shit, according to some of the videos I’ve seen. So, they just come back. Who would have thought moving to the desert to live with intolerant Arabs, with vague rules, that leave you on edge all the time, would be worse than paying taxes.
Most respectable governments don’t just let you stay forever for a fee (except orange mans banana Republic).
Applying for visas, long term stays, green cards, relocating businesses, moving houses, dozens of moving parts which even millionaires can’t avoid. The tax increases are likely cheaper than relocating.
Plus on the business end, some millionaires have fully made and established themselves here, they’ll likely be bankrupt trying to expand or move abroad with the same business model
I’m shocked, shocked!
Well not that shocked.
Who could have foreseen that the rich, when threatened with any form of higher tax would throw their toys out the pram and threaten to leave. Then not actually bother because it turns out leaving a country requires a lot of effort that isn’t worth committing too when you already have shit loads of money?
This piece is an absolte nonsense from a clearly biased source. They are trying to use the description of millionaires as anyone with assets worth over £750k (so basically everyone who owns a house in London?).
“Moreover, the report (Henley and Partners) uses a far narrower definition of ‘millionaires’ that does not include all dollar millionaires like the standard definition (people with net worth of 1 million dollars or more), but rather only individuals with liquid assets worth 1 million dollars or more, who are thus richer and more mobile on average than a standardly defined millionaire.”
No one is claiming that people with a net worth of £750k is leaving. The people who are leaving – and they categorically are – are the HNWIs and UHNWIs. We’ve lost more billionaires last year than any year on record. And that means a hell of a lot less tax collected. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-08/uk-faces-wealth-exodus-of-mega-rich-baby-boomers](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-08/uk-faces-wealth-exodus-of-mega-rich-baby-boomers)
As for the “Patriotic Millionaires”, HMRC will gladly accept voluntary tax overpayments. I’d love for them to show us their receipts of them doing so.
This is more of a nomenclature thing than anything else, the meaning of the term “millionaire” is being eroded by inflation (particularly in assets).
“The UK’s 3.06 millionaires” is, roughly, including people who have a house and a pension totalling approx 1M USD, so about 750K GBP.
Of course people with 750K aren’t leaving in droves. That’s describing people who have paid off a decent whack of their mortgage in the south east, e.g. most professionals in their 40s-50s and above.
What is more interesting is to look at what is happening with people in say the 3M, 5M, 10M bracket, people who have the optionality to buy a decent sized house in a decent area and it not be 50%+ of their net worth, people who have the ability to live on investment income alone.
Of course it didn’t. They already use all the tax loopholes and avoid paying anything substantial. They hoo haa they create anytime tax the rich comes up is to maintain those loopholes and nothing more.
Oh what a fucking surprise, turns out that another argument against taxing the rich is pure bullshit!
I am Jacks sense of suprise
Dubai is a shit-hole, you can threaten to move there but most won’t
Perhaps because this is a rumour that is started by the rich.
You have to remember that these stories originate from similar people to that plumber who made his millions off cheap labour and parked his Roller on the pavement outside a court. If he wants to rot in Dubai, he’s welcome to it.
I mean did anyone other than this company selling services to expat millionaires actually claim it did?
lol. lmao even.
I kept saying this millionaire exodus doesn’t make sense. Because if a millionaire leaves, so what? They probably weren’t paying any tax anyway. The taxes incurred upon selling their assets and leaving is probably greater than the sum of tax paid in decades. Because millionaires don’t make money like the rest of us. It’s not as if they’re on PAYE.
The thing you’d typically tax is capital gains, usually via the assets they have in this country, be it property, or businesses. Property and businesses remain taxable regardless of personal residency. They *quite literally* can’t move. Because if it’s a property, it will be sold and bought by another person that *is* staying in the country. And if it’s a business, even if taxes are super high, you’re still incentivized to stay in the UK because of market access.
As a business you *want* access to the UK market, because it’s full of relatively rich, affluent people that have the capital to buy your product and/or service. Unless your business is totally unprofitable, it’s a no-brainer to keep this entity here, and therefore free and open to be taxed, because it will always ultimately *make* money despite the tax. And if it doesn’t make money, the business deserves to die anyway, since it isn’t competitive. You can think of it as a “pay to play” model. You as a business can have access to all of our wonderful rich consumers, but if you want to operate in this country, you have to pay a fee. If you don’t pay this fee, then fuck off, let another business fill your niche that will pay the fee. The whole point is that you should be okay paying this fee, because you’ll make money anyway.
The physical act of a millionaire packing their bags and leaving these British isles is such a miniscule hit that it barely even warrants a mention. Because a huge share of millionaires in this country are actually just normal day to day pensioners, or early retirees from small businesses, with over a million in assets that are liquidating those assets and leaving for warmer climates. So of course they will move away, but their assets and businesses will remain. Seemingly the majority of liquid, high-earning individuals that we’d actually class as stereotypical “millionaires” seem fairly stable.
This is all bloviating and hyperbole to instil panic in trusting a Labour governments policies, and does nothing but attempt to promote fear and distrust of them because it tells the reader that people more successful than them, and therefore more knowledgeable on economic matters see problems with Labour they want to escape from. When in reality, these problems don’t exist, it’s just spin.
Like millionaires are just going to leave for tax reason, money isn’t everything and there’s reasons why even we normies don’t leave the uk for Europe when we’re pissed off, our wholes lives are here and so are theirs.
And if their lives aren’t here, then who cares if they leave, they clearly don’t have any love for the place
They always forget that the US taxes you if you leave the country.
US expat tax literally does everything they fear yet I don’t see them ever talk about it
I work in this space. I see a good number left already and more leaving in the next 6 months. Importantly, many foreign entrepreneurs are no longer coming to live in the UK.
Didn’t the original article about it end up just a bunch of people changing their LinkedIn profiles to different countries and they just took that number and multiplied it by like 48 months?
This is complete bollocks, what even is taxjustice.net? The UK had a net exodus of about -11k millionaires, an increase of about 350% compared to the previous year and more than China/India on a per capita millionaire basis. I’ve been following Henleyglobal report for many years now, to put it into comparison America gained 3,800 millionaires.
Utterly biased source.
But but but, the rich threatened they’d all leave..
Wealth tax now.
Hmm I wonder why the Telegraph was blaming the economic stagnation on this just a couple months ago.
> The Tax Justice Network’s review – co-published with Patriotic Millionaires UK and Tax Justice UK
Yeah, no vested interests here. Anyone in the UK can volunteer to pay more tax, yet somehow none of the Patriotic Millionaires UK have done so.
> The media reporting – consisting of over 10,900 news pieces across print, broadcast and online news in 2024 – was primarily based on a report published by Henley & Partners1, a firm that sells golden passports to the superrich and advises governments on setting up such schemes.
Aye, I tried to point this out whenever any of these articles were posted. The vast majority of the time the ‘source’ was a company who have a financial incentive in telling millionaires that they should leave Britain and that they should hire their company to help them relocate. Their methodology was incredibly suspect, basically boiling down to ‘well we’re well connected and know a lot of millionaires to we know what we’re talking about’. It’s about as reliable as taking a report from Cadbury that says chocolate is good for your health at face value.
It’s just another in a long list of examples of how vapid and dishonest our right-wing press is. There’s an entire propaganda mill of billionaire funded ‘think-tanks’, consultancy firms with a financial incentive to spread misinformation, and billionaire owned right-wing newspapers who just regurgitate them same bollocks between themselves.
so what if they do?
They can’t take infrastructure and property with them, and that’s the stuff we want to tax/get back within public ownership.
Even the goddamn London School of Economics agrees.
What they care about is quality of life.
We should be taxing them so much more, and then putting that money towards not only investing in the country and the populus (you know, so we have high quality citizens that any company with half a brain would be desperate to employ due to how “smart” and “productive” we are)
And putting it towards making the UK a nice place to live, where poverty isn’t rampant, where culture and learning can flourish because we’re all not just struggling to survive.
Christ just look at Denmark.
Some of the highest tax burden in europe, with some of the highest GDP growth in recent years.