INTERNATIONAL - It’s official: Jim Ratcliffe, the UK’s richest person, is now a Monaco resident.
The 67-year-old is listed as living in the principality on the French Riviera, where residents typically don’t pay income or capital-gains taxes, according to a filing this week from a U.K. company he helps manage.
Ratcliffe is worth $22.5 billion through his major stake in closely held Ineos, the London-based chemicals manufacturer he’s helped build since the 1990s. Details of his relocation have circulated since 2018, and last year the Sunday Times reported that tax planning around Ratcliffe and other senior Ineos executives caused tension with the company’s auditor, PwC. The accounting firm later resigned as Ineos’s auditor.
A spokesman for PwC declined to comment. A representative for Ineos didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Monaco first emerged as an option for Ratcliffe when he and other Ineos executives considered moving the company’s headquarters about a decade ago after a tax disagreement with the British government. At the time, the prospect of shifting Ineos employees and their young families to the sovereign state prompted the company’s leaders to settle on the larger jurisdiction of Switzerland.
Leaving the U.K. for Switzerland “was a remorseful time -- all three Ineos leaders defined themselves as deeply ‘pro-British,’” according to a 2018 biography of the company co-authored by Ratcliffe. “The search for a suitable relocation destination was a mix of emotion and tax pragmatism.”
Other wealthy backers of the U.K.’s European Union exit have also shifted their fortune since the nation voted to leave the trading bloc in 2016. James Dyson relocated to Singapore, and Anthony Bamford, chairman of excavator maker JC Bamford Excavators Ltd., transferred shares in the firm’s Caribbean holding companies to Switzerland this year, altering arrangements that fostered his family’s fortune for decades.
BLOOMBERG