Labour’s non-dom tax raid forces Castle-owning fintech founder out of the UK
The owner of a £6m castle in Kent would have set up a credit fintech employing dozens of UK workers had the reforms to the non-dom status made by “Reckless Reeves” not meant she could “no longer stay in the UK”.
Reality television star Ann Kaplan Mulholland has claimed non-dom status with her cosmetic surgeon husband for three years, but the couple have decided to move to Milan to escape the government’s decision in October’s Budget to scrap the favourable tax regime.
“We can’t stay we have too many businesses worldwide, and there’s no way we’re paying inheritance tax or having our kids taxed – that’s a lot of money,” she told City PM. “So we’re moving to Italy.”
With her exit, the Canadian, who starred in Real Housewives of Toronto and is the founder of several businesses, including small loans specialist IFinance, joins a wave of millionaires and billionaires leaving the UK.
According to figures from analytics firm New World Wealth, 10,800 people with over $1m in liquid assets left the UK last year, the highest number ever and a 157 per cent increase on the number of high-net-worth departures in 2023.
Kaplan Mulholland and her husband—founder of Morpheus 8, Stephen Mulholland—will move to the northern Italian city before April 2026.
Despite Mulholland confessing to not even liking the city, the pair were lured over by Italy’s flat tax residence scheme for wealthy foreigners, which charges claimants €200,000 annually to keep their foreign assets and income offshore and outside of the country’s revenue services.
In an interview with City PM, the ‘Real Housewife’ turned non-dom confirmed that despite their impending exit, her and her husband would retain ownership of Kent’s Lympne Castle.
The non-dom couple bought the Grade I-listed fortified manor house for £6m in 2023 and invested a purported £25m.
“I’m not going to stop running the [castle] business,” she said. “I’ve got 100 employees and I’m not going to take these jobs away from people.
“If I was a jerk, I would. I’d just go, ‘Forget it. I’m selling the castle and I’m off.’ But there are people that believed in me, that came on board and I know I’m helping the community by investing in a business there.”
Kaplan Mulholland started iFinance in 1996 and grew it into one of Canada’s largest consumer finance firms.
She revealed to City PM she had plans to set up a fintech in a similar space in the UK, one she said would have employed staff and created wealth in the UK, had the non-dom reforms led her to feel she had to leave.
“If I’d been here longer, I would have set up a company that does pre-approval approvals for loans,” she said. “So you would apply for a loan but it would have funnelled through us as a middleman so companies don’t have to set up their own lending platform. There’s a niche market for that and the UK would have been perfect.”
‘There’s no end to what we spend’
Kaplan Mulholland also used the interview to corroborate fears within London’s luxury sector about the effect ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) departing the UK will have on high-end restaurants, designer labels, and the people they employ.
“When I speak to the different boutique stores at Harrods, they’re really concerned about the exodus of people that are funding the restaurants,” she said.
She listed luxury items like Louis Vuitton handbags and some of London’s storied restaurants and added, “There’s no end to what we spend.”
Instead of scrapping the non-dom regime, the entrepreneur-cum-reality star, who has filmed another as yet unreleased TV series documenting the restoration of Lympne Castle, believes the UK should adopt a non-dom regime similar to the one in place in Italy.
She said: “If Reckless Reeves takes a leaf out of that book and says, ‘OK, non-doms get to choose whether they want the current forms [which attract people coming over for shorter term high-paid jobs], or, if like us you’re coming in on a wealth investment status, you pay a £200,000-a-year fee.”