The Financial Times quotes Dominic Lawrance on our Firm's role in the Foreign Investors for Britain lobby group
In an article on the abolition of the non-dom tax regime, the Financial Times references our Firm - specifically our work relating to the lobby group Foreign Investors for Britain (FIfB).
The piece talks through the origins of FIfB, explaining how the original campaign built on earlier work done by a group of law firms - including our own - and then crystallised into FIfB after the July general election.
The piece explains that FIfB's main ask is for the government to put in place a tiered tax regime that would exempt non-doms from inheritance tax on non-UK assets and free them from UK levies on foreign income, gains and certain UK investments for up to 15 years. They would pay different levels of annual charge to achieve this, ranging from paying £200,000 on net wealth as high as £100mn to £2mn for net wealth more than £500mn. This would mirror similar regimes in the likes of Italy and Switzerland.
Dominic Lawrance, Private Client Partner, explains that FIfB initially set out “to make sure the government was making decisions on an informed basis, not on the back of guesswork, blind optimism or previous research which was deeply flawed". He admits that “financial modelling has been the hardest thing” because of the paucity of comprehensive data on contributions from the UK’s non-dom contingent.
Dominic continues:
The best thing the government could do would be on Budget day to say something to steel people’s nerves and stop the exodus [...] But they don’t have the data they need to make a firm decision [on the tiered tax regime]. They haven’t had enough time to think it through yet.
Read the full article in the Financial Times here (subscription required).
