The assertion in the opening post assumes a lot. I suspect it's not safe. Accusation of bluffing rich people, not proven.
Quoting wot I rote somewhere else recently:
Lineker's 35m doesn't mean he's in the super rich who'd gain massively by going abroad.
It takes 100 Linekers to make one Dyson
I had a look . We have 150 odd Billionaires, and 3 million ish millionaires.
Numbers are hard to pin down, but around a third of the Billi's move abroad or move assets abroad, and that number spikes when there's a tax tightening. Tightening non-dom status felt right, but apparently it cost us money.
Linekers aren't very relevant here, the ones earning hundreds of times more, overwhelm them.
It's the billionaires who make the moves, but simply counting them number of people isn't the way to see what the effect was.
They can tweak things to optimise their positions.
I stayed at a very nice converted farmhouse in Provence, with a friend who house-sits for the owner. He's a senior exec at HSBC, and his wife apparently earns even more. They have houses all over the world, a fleet of Ferraris, etc. He explained how he moves between them to minimise their tax, being able to work from any of them. I knew some of the Goldsmith clan, they did the same. Teddy G went around the world on an ecological mission trying to get people to pollute less. He stayed long enough to help with the tax. He flew, of course.
These folk employ clever accountants to maximise their masters' net income, by investing and "deploying" it. If appropriate beneficial mechanisms are put in place by the UK government, individuals' and companies' money can be encouraged to stay here. And the tax which gets paid on it stays here. But it satisfies the tabloids to be able to proclaim the taxes higher, without caring how.
"Non-dom status" as a name may have gone, but the new FIG rules provide some similar benefits. Many countries have similar arrangements of some sort. They are complex, but it can be easier now to arrange to comply with the numbers (of days etc) required to avoid the uk taxes.
There seems to be a lot of scope for creative accounting too.
In short, if you got this far, it's darned difficult.
Proving where you are domiciled, etc, always was difficult.
Some people clearly "left" and cost us.
Some clearly stayed and pay more tax here.
Many are in a grey area.
HMRC's report comes out next year. They say there's "considerable uncertainty". They predict a gain in tax take, but hey would, wouldn't they. One clear difficulty is that they can look at Earned income, but many of the wealthiest people people are called "investors", who don't get a salary at all.
The true positions may take years to settle and work out.
www.dailymail.com
