‘I am moving – that is it’: tycoon speaks out about the end of non-dom tax status

Bassim Haidar says he can’t imagine the situation where a non-dom will still opt to stay in the UK ‘where they will be punished with a with an extremely punitive tax system’. Photograph: BH Holdings

Bassim Haidar is house hunting. He owns “more than 10 properties” in central London, including a £20m five-bedroom flat near Chelsea’s Sloane Square. But he said he had decided to “urgently” leave the UK to avoid paying millions of pounds in tax after the government and Labour’s plan to scrap the “non-domicile” regime, which has allowed Haidar, and 68,800 other non-doms, to avoid paying UK tax on their overseas income for the past 225 years.

“I am moving – that is it,” said Haidar, an entrepreneur who has lived in the UK on-and-off since 2010. “There’s no two questions about this; we have looked at it from every angle and it just doesn’t make sense to stay here. This [the ending of the non-dom regime] is going to cost me millions and millions of dollars and pounds every year in taxes on money that I’ve actually made abroad and businesses that I’ve built abroad.”

Haidar is starting his search for a new house – and tax-domicile – this week. First in Monaco, the tax-free principality on France’s Côte d‘Azur, and then tax-free Dubai. “What’s the logic of me living in the UK when other countries are offering no taxes at all? In Monaco there are no taxes, and no inheritance tax.

“We already have a property very close to Monaco, in the south of France. But we want to live in Monaco and become Monaco residents, and just spend time between both properties.”

Haidar, 53, who was born in Nigeria but has Lebanese citizenship, donated £360,000 to the Conservatives last year. He said he was not consulted by the government or the Tory party about the decision to scrap the non-dom tax scheme, but that he did not expect to receive special consultation because of his donation.

He said he had formed a working group of 29 non-doms, who mostly planned to leave the UK before September so that they could secure places for their children in private schools in their new countries before the start of the academic year.

“I just can’t imagine the situation where someone [a non-dom] will still opt to stay in the UK … where they will be punished with an extremely punitive tax system, when countries in Europe are actually offering non-doms amazing, amazing, amazing alternatives like Italy, Spain, Switzerland.”

Haidar said he decided to speak out about his decision to leave the UK after reading about advisers to the super-rich warning that many of their clients planned to leave.

He built his fortune in telecommunications and now sits above an empire that includes fintech, logistics, energy, engineering and medicinal cannabis. As well as a portfolio of more than a dozen properties across the world, he owns a super yacht and previously owned the yacht on which Diana, Princess of Wales, holidayed with Dodi Fayed shortly before her death in 1997.

Asked if he was a billionaire, as has been frequently reported, Haidar said: “Let me just say I am close to that.”

His decision to leave the UK has also led him to cancelling his plan to list Optasia, a financial services company he founded and claims is worth more than $1bn (£800m), on the London stock market. “I am supposed to be listing my company here, and was actually talking to the London Stock Exchange about listing [Optasia] here,” he said. “It’s going to be a billion-dollar IPO and I’ve just decided I’m not doing it here; it is too taxing for me to do it here.”

Haidar said two non-dom friends had already left the UK, less than two months after the chancellor announced in his spring budget the abolition of the regime from April 2025. He said the men, who run hedge funds, had left for Dubai and Switzerland.

Haidar claimed the scrapping of the non-dom scheme would lead to a fall in UK tax income, rather than raise the extra £2.7bn the government was targeting when it announced the change. “When we leave, we will not pay the taxes that we do pay on our UK income and capital gains tax, and VAT,” he said. “We are happy to pay that. But won’t pay when we’re not here. So actually there’s going to be a bigger hole.” He also said the economy would suffer from missing out on the large amounts of money that wealthy non-doms spend in the UK.

Haidar said he would be forced to make his household staff of almost 20 in the UK redundant when he leaves, and he expected other non-doms would also cut back on their staff.

Haidar said he would be happy to pay a £200,000-a-year “flat tax” – similar to a €100,000-a-year (£85,000) scheme offered in Italy – to retain the non-dom status. “I am happy to pay £200,000 on money I don’t earn in the UK.”

He said that if only a small fraction of the non-doms in the UK paid a flat tax of £200,000 or even £100,000, it would raise far more money in tax income than the extra £2.7bn tax the government hopes to raise by scrapping the non-dom regime.

Haidar said he was sad to be leaving London, a city that he has called home for more than a decade, but said he had to leave to save his four children the risk of paying inheritance tax on his fortune.

“We love London, we love the lifestyle,” he said. “We love everything about it, and we’re gutted that we have to go, but we have to think of our future, and the future of our children. With such a punitive tax system [now in the UK], for the protection of their future wealth it makes a lot of sense for them to leave and for us to leave.”