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.”
