Britain is haemorrhaging billionaires, we’re told.
Nearly every week brings a news report that the government’s tax plans are driving another member of the Rich List to pack up for foreign shores.
The latest is the raft of media stories last weekend that 88-year-old property magnate David Reuben (net worth £9.9 billion, according to Forbes) left the UK earlier this year.
The front page of the Sunday Times reported that Reuben “moved to Monaco over the summer”, having prior to that been “living in Holland Park, west London”, the latest in “a wave of similar departures since Labour came to power”.
Most major UK news outlets, and many foreign ones, have quickly replicated the Sunday Times’ story. No quoted source in the original piece gave any indication about David Reuben’s motive, but most of the stories have blamed the 2025 abolition of the non-dom tax system, recent changes to capital gains and inheritance tax, or fears about potential wealth or exit taxes in the forthcoming Budget.
There’s just one problem: according to official documents, including company records and a signed court declaration, David Reuben left the UK years ago.
In July 2019, when David Reuben became a director of his eponymous charitable foundation, the paperwork filed at the UK company registry stated clearly that he was “usually resident” in Monaco, just like his brother and co-investor.
Source: UK Companies House
And in February 2024 David Reuben provided a signed declaration under penalty of perjury to a Los Angeles court, stating that “I reside in Monaco. I have resided there for approximately 10 years”.
(This was important for the brothers’ claim that the court lacked jurisdiction, and also that they had not been properly served with summons delivered to a London service company, arguing in their Motion to Quash that the Plaintiff “cannot serve process on the Reuben Brothers, who live in Monaco, just by leaving the papers with [the service company’s] personal assistant in London”).
Source: Superior Court of Los Angeles County – West District (annotations added)
Despite these declarations to Companies House in 2019 and a US court in 2024 that David Reuben has been resident in Monaco since around 2014, TaxWatch understands that the Sunday Times was told earlier this year that David Reuben was resident in London. This week it reported subsequent confirmation by the Reuben brothers’ spokesperson, without further comment, that David was currently resident in Monaco.
Based on these two statements, it reported that David Reuben had moved to Monaco in the meantime.
There’s only one scenario that could make this true, and consistent with the legal documents: that having spent ten years in Monaco, David Reuben decided at some point since March 2024, at the age of 86, to move back to the UK and into its tax net – and then rapidly decided to leave again.
(At best, such a temporary returnee, already with a decade of offshore residence, can hardly be the Labour-driven tax exile that much of the UK press have claimed, nor a vital part of UK tax revenues).
The other possibility, as a source with direct knowledge of David Reuben’s affairs insisted to TaxWatch this week, is that he has indeed been resident in Monaco for many years, and that claims that he moved his residency from the UK this summer are simply incorrect.
None of the dozens of news stories published this week have mentioned the publicly available documents about David Reuben’s residence.
For most reports of ‘billionaire exodus’ we don’t have public records to compare against claims about people’s tax status. As a result, a large proportion of the political and media conversation about the UK’s tax system rests on newspaper stories about ultra-wealthy individuals’ tax payments and residence which we simply can’t verify. Last month politicians in both Houses of Parliament – including the Leader of the Opposition at Prime Minister’s Questions – criticized the government’s fiscal policies by citing another anonymously-sourced piece of information: the alleged £300 million tax payments of hedge fund billionaire Chris Rokos, who news organisations have similarly reported, based on anonymous sources, to be planning to move to Greece.
How can we verify the claims repeated by these MPs and peers either?
The autumn Budget may see some of the biggest changes in years to how gains from wealth are taxed. Perhaps it’s time that our politicians, and our media, debate these changes based on public facts and verifiable numbers – not anecdotes and anonymous reports from billionaires and their spokespeople.
Main image: Rishi Jhajharia on Unsplash
