Rokos & rolling in it
In the Money , Issue 1684 BILLIONAIRE Chris Rokos must be hoping he gets better advice on his offshore flit to Greece than he has on previous tax ruses.

In 2023 Rokos, who earlier this month said he would be leaving the UK, settled a long-running case with Deloitte over claims the accountancy giant had given him bad advice on a failed data centre investment scheme that landed him with a £40m back tax bill.

Two years later, Rokos was again at loggerheads with HM Revenue & Customs. In the mid-2000s he’d invested in two film companies that government lawyers said were “finance schemes that were intended to generate losses in their first year of trading”. When a 2017 court ruling found that similar investments weren’t entitled to tax relief, HMRC asked Rokos to cough up over his schemes.

Rokos claimed HMRC had failed to notify the start of its probe properly. Earlier this year, a judge dismissed his claims. There could be more awkward questions from HMRC to come.

Shadowy grip
Meanwhile, the furore over Rokos’s departure ahead of chancellor John Healey’s budget next month continues to showcase how uninformed much of the debate is around taxing the wealthy. One who must try harder to get a rudimentary grip on how the tax system works is… Healey’s Tory shadow, Andrew Griffith.

Rokos’s tax payments for 2025-26 were estimated in the Sunday Times at £330m. His spokesman confirmed to the Eye that Rokos paid at least that amount. Griffith told Healey in the Commons, “it would take 38,000 average taxpayers” to replace Rokos. Except that it wouldn’t.

Home truth
The bulk of Rokos’s income, and thus his tax bill, comes from his share of profits in his hedge fund, Rokos Capital Management LLP. Last year, his share of the £940m profits was £477m, on which he would have paid about £215m income tax. The remaining £115m-plus of Rokos’s tax is thought to have come from his ample investments.

The bulk of Rokos’s income remains taxable even for a non-resident because it is earned from a business operating in the UK. The income tax on this would disappear only if the hedge fund business itself, which has 23 partners and employs more than 200 others, upped sticks. For any number of reasons, this is unlikely.

Clues & cluelessness
The number of people who leave the country when a tax break is withdrawn is always uncertain.

Wealth management and tax advisory firms that make fortunes advising on using those breaks can be relied on to make claims of an “exodus” based on spurious surveys. HM Revenue and Customs statistics on the numbers of non-domiciled individuals leaving after the tax status was scrapped last year suggest fears were overblown.

Whether making “non-doms” subject to inheritance tax on the same basis as everyone else, or raising capital gains tax (24 percent on most assets for higher rate taxpayers) to something approaching income tax levels, all debates on equalising tax for the rich get mired in impossible guesses of the immediate fiscal effect. With that argument conducted in ignorance of the facts, perhaps it’s better to recognise that in the long run there might be something to be said for a tax system with fewer distortions and more equal treatment for all.

After his snipe at Healey at Westminster, Griffith took to X to claim the chancellor “didn’t have a clue”. He wasn’t the only one.