[LONDON] An heir from one of India’s richest families, the top shareholder in UK telecommunications giant BT Group, has relocated from Britain amid tax hikes on the nation’s wealthy residents.
Shravin Bharti Mittal, 37, now lists the United Arab Emirates as his residence after previously listing the UK, according to a registry filing for part of his billionaire family’s namesake conglomerate, which owns 24.5 per cent of one of Britain’s largest mobile and broadband companies. He set up an Abu Dhabi branch last month for an investment firm, Unbound, he founded in London, other filings show.
Representatives for the Bharti Mittal family, who have a combined fortune of US$27.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, did not immediately respond to e-mails and calls seeking comment.
The move shows how some of the world’s richest millennials are joining their older counterparts in exiting the UK after it introduced sweeping tax reforms targeting its wealthy non-domiciled residents, who live in the UK but originally hail from abroad.
It’s also a blow to the British government’s ambitions to attract top global talent, part of broader efforts to improve the UK’s immigration system outlined by Keir Starmer’s Labour administration in a wide-ranging policy document released this month.
In March 2024, the then-ruling Conservative government scrapped a preferential regime for non-doms that allowed them to avoid UK taxes on their overseas earnings for as long as 15 years, replacing it with a shorter timeframe. Labour mirrored that policy after winning the UK general election in July, but Chancellor Rachel Reeves went a step further and eliminated inheritance tax breaks on non-doms’ overseas assets, causing many of them to leave or consider leaving.
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A study this month from the Centre for Economics and Business Research think-tank said the changes will end up costing the UK money if at least a quarter of its roughly 74,000 non-doms exit.
Other individuals leaving the UK for the Middle East include Egypt’s richest person, Nassef Sawiris, who is relocating to Abu Dhabi as well as Italy. Two members of the billionaire Lazari dynasty – Leonidas, 58, and Nicholas, 54, whose namesake investment firm owns swathes of London properties – are now usually living in Cyprus, other filings show. A spokesperson for Lazari Investments, whose late founder Christos was born in the Mediterranean nation that offers its own non-don regime, declined to comment.
“There will certainly be an exodus,” said Gianpaolo Mantini, a London-based partner and financial planner at wealth advisory firm Saltus. Those doing so “are already tax mobile”.
UK ties
Shravin Bharti Mittal is a high-profile example of a scion from an ultra-rich family putting down roots and investing in Britain, a nation that’s traditionally been a leader in luring the global elite.
He started his career in London more than a decade ago, working at JPMorgan Chase as an investment banking analyst after studying accounting and finance at the University of Bath, according to his LinkedIn profile. He then worked at a private equity firm in London before becoming a managing director for an investment arm of New Delhi-based Bharti Enterprises, which was founded by his father Sunil and has other holdings spanning finance, real estate and hospitality.
He still held that role at Bharti Global when it bought a stake in BT last year from billionaire Patrick Drahi. His 41-year-old sister, Eiesha, who continues to lists the UK as her residency, took on that position from Apr 1, when Shravin’s relocation to the UAE also took place, filings show. BLOOMBERG
