Tax Exile Guy Hands Finds Lonely Guernsey Haven Is No Heaven

Guy Hands, the U.K. investor whose fund bought the Beatles record label, says he hasn’t visited his wife and two school-age children at their home in Kent, where he was born near London, since April.

The founder of Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. never flies through London airports and has missed industry awards in the U.K. capital since moving to Guernsey in the Channel Islands to reduce taxes, according to court filings. He doesn’t see his parents or his doctors in London anymore.

The decision to become a tax exile has proven a “burdensome option for me and my family,” Hands said in documents filed Feb. 4 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan as he sought to prevent a court fight with Citigroup Inc. from being heard in the U.K. His story is a cautionary tale for bankers and money managers who are tempted to flee London’s rising taxes.

“It’s a personal choice: you have to trade off the right infrastructure, work environment, the country you grew up in, your family, the schools, your whole life, with wealth,” said Richard Wilson, partner at London-based private equity firm Apax Partners LLP. “My trade off would be to stay where I am.” Wilson, who is chairman of the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, lives near London.

Financial executives are threatening to leave the U.K. since the government decided to raise the top rate of personal income tax to 50 percent and put a one-time 50 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses. Hedge fund firm BlueCrest Capital Management Ltd., inter-dealer broker Tullett Prebon Plc and insurer Chaucer Holdings Plc have said they may move employees overseas.

Symbol of Discontent

Hands’s departure 11 months ago from the country where he became rich for low-tax Guernsey created headlines in the London newspapers and made him a symbol of the discontent among the wealthy over rising taxes. It may have also made him a target for government tax enforcers, he said.

“Because of my high public profile in the United Kingdom and the considerable press interest and commentary on my leaving, I understand that I can expect higher than normal Inland Revenue scrutiny of my valid claim to non-residence,” Hands said in a court filing.

He declined to comment for this story.

In the filing, Hands said there is “considerable uncertainty” about what constitutes being a U.K. resident for tax purposes. That anxiety was heightened among exiles on Feb. 16, when the U.K. court of appeal upheld a previous decision ruling that British entrepreneur Robert Gaines-Cooper was subject to British taxes even though he had settled and married in the Seychelles Islands in the 1970s.

More: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-17/tax-exile-guy-hands-finds-lonely-guernsey-haven-is-no-heaven.html

He's making a mistake by still having assets in UK...

Tax Exile Guy Hands Finds Lonely Guernsey Haven Is No Heaven

Tax Exile Guy Hands Finds Lonely Guernsey Haven Is No Heaven

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

AnCaps' Laissez-faire Free Trade Zone