If you're rich enough to need to live in a tax haven, surely you're rich enough not to need to? I suppose where I'm
coming from is that I haven't been to tax haven yet that hasn't been
somewhere that I couldn't wait to leave, most egregiously Monaco, Guernsey
or the Isle of Man. What unites these places? What makes them so grim?
It's probably the tax refugees that live there, people that make a
lifestyle decision that is based on money only and perhaps only wanting
to be around those who think the same way. Take Guy Hands, the financier
and Guernsey. By any standards, other than those of Philip Green who has
chosen Monaco as his particular nest, Hands is rich - private jet,
helicopter-flying rich. But he chooses to live on an island of suffocating
provincialism, apart from his family and friends ....for what? An extra
nought that he can't take with him? The opportunity to ruin his children's
lives with too much money?
Everyone to their own - but you won't catch me there.
