Celebrity tax exile: More money than sense

Tracey Emin was recently added to the list of well known figures reportedly leaving Britain for tax reasons. ‘Good riddance’, says Simon Sweetman.

Tracey Emin, queen of Britart, is considering moving to France for tax reasons. According to The Times: “She joins a threatened exodus by celebrities, footballers and hedge fund bosses in search of less onerous tax regimes”. When drawing up a list of those who would not be missed, most people in this country would probably have produced something very similar.

For her next project, Emin will be offering to design and make personalised neon signs for up to 10 buyers, each of whom is willing to pay £65,000.

Any individual wanting a neon sign must fill in a form with 15 questions so that it can be customised. Questions will include your favourite colour and poem, and some more personal ones such as whether you believe in God or talk while making love (or perhaps whether you talk to God or believe in the power of love).

I suspect that whatever your views about Tracey Emin, it is hard not to feel that anyone forking out for this has so much surplus cash that they ought to be paying more tax themselves (or indeed that we ought to have their names and addresses).

Bonjour taxman
Ms Emin already has a house in France and clearly makes well over £150,000 a year (for activities that might not go down too well with most of the taxpaying public), so I suspect she will find it hard to garner too much sympathy for her plight. But would the move make sense (ignoring the possibility that, as so often with these declarations, it’s just another piece of publicity)? Several of the entrepreneurs reported to be ‘suffering’ under the current regime don’t actually seem to have left the country.

If one were planning to go somewhere and not pay very much in tax, it is clear that France would not be top of the list. The French tax system is bureaucratic in the extreme; you have complications with local taxes, and in general the French are more heavily taxed than the British, so presumably Ms Emin had not talked to her tax adviser before shooting her mouth off.

In some circles people seem to believe that France is easier because of the deal that was set up with the Rolling Stones - but that was 30 years ago. There may be good reasons for living in France (like the cheese counters in hypermarkets) but I don’t think tax is one of them.

In the meantime if anyone would like a copy of this article handwritten on vellum, it’s yours for £10,000 - what a snip!