Another Billionaire Leaves Britain: Monzo Backer Joins Goldman Sachs and Ineos Executives in Tax Exodus

Thor Björgólfsson, the investor known as Iceland's first billionaire, has quit Britain for Italy, becoming the latest wealthy name to leave since Labour scrapped the non-dom regime. He joins Goldman Sachs executive Richard Gnodde and Ineos finance chief John Reece among the moneyed figures who have already gone.

Björgólfsson, worth around £750M ($1B) on the Forbes billionaires list, switched his tax residency to Milan over the past year, and moved Novator out of London to Zurich, a shift understood to have cost around 20 jobs. The firm he founded was the lead backer of a £60M ($80M) funding round into the banking app Monzo in 2020. In an interview with Bloomberg, he warned that the flight of wealthy entrepreneurs 'is an exodus, it's not been hype.'

The trigger was the end of non-dom status, the near two-century-old rule that let some UK residents keep overseas earnings beyond the reach of full British tax. Chancellor Rachel Reeves abolished it in April 2025, replacing it with the Foreign Income and Gains regime, which grants eligible new arrivals only a four-year exemption on foreign earnings. A later Budget also pulled wealthy foreigners' overseas assets into the scope of inheritance tax. 'It's amazing how fast it has happened. The collateral damage is exploding elsewhere,' he said.

The Billionaires Who Have Already Left

Gnodde and Reece are only part of the picture. Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, the ArcelorMittal founder and one of Britain's wealthiest residents at about £15.4B ($20.6B), is giving up his UK tax residency to base himself in Dubai. Nassef Sawiris, Egypt's richest man and the Aston Villa co-owner, worth roughly £6.5B ($8.7B), registered as a resident of Italy and Abu Dhabi in 2025 and closed his Mayfair office. John Fredriksen, the Norwegian-born shipping billionaire whose fortune tops £7.5B ($10B), shut his London headquarters, put his Chelsea mansion up for sale, and moved his empire to the United Arab Emirates.

The leavers have split broadly between two destinations. Gnodde has settled in Milan, and Sawiris and Björgólfsson have also chosen Italy, drawn by its cap on tax. Mittal and Fredriksen have gone instead to the UAE, which levies no personal income tax at all.

Björgólfsson puts the blame less on the principle than the execution. Recalling a meeting with an adviser to Sir Keir Starmer, alongside other high-net-worth individuals, he was blunt. 'What worries me is that the Government kind of made a mistake and realised they'd made a mistake,' he said.

Italy's Flat Tax and the Race for Mobile Money

His preferred fix is an Italian-style flat-rate tax that caps the total owed rather than taxing worldwide income. Italy's scheme for new wealthy residents has climbed from €100,000 (£86,000, $116,000) in 2017 to €200,000 (£172,000, $232,000) in 2024, and to €300,000 (£258,000, $348,000) for arrivals from 2026, yet Milan has kept its pull. Reeves has since softened the inheritance tax change with a £5M ($6.7M) cap per decade on what can be levied on former non-doms, which Björgólfsson dismissed as 'a little too late when people have bought places abroad.'

How big the outflow really is remains contested. Henley & Partners, the residence advisory firm, estimated that Britain lost a net 16,500 dollar millionaires in 2025, more than double the roughly 7,500 who left the year before and the steepest exit it has logged for any country. The Tax Justice Network counters that a net loss of well under 1% of Britain's roughly 3M millionaires hardly amounts to a mass departure, and that the figures rest on modelled estimates, not hard migration data.

The argument now passes to a new occupant of Number 10. Andy Burnham becomes prime minister this week, and wealthy investors fear an early raid, with capital gains tax, currently 18% for basic-rate taxpayers and 24% for higher-rate taxpayers, seen as the likeliest target for alignment with income tax rates that reach 45%.

The Treasury has held firm. A spokesman said people who make their home in Britain 'should pay your taxes here too,' pointing to the £39.5B ($53B) the change is expected to raise for public services over five years and arguing the new residence-based system is simpler than the one it replaced.