By Eamon Shahir, Co-Founder of Taxd.co.uk
Britain has long prided itself on being one of the best places in the world to start a business, yet an increasingly telling pattern has emerged over the past decade: the founders who build something significant here are often the ones most likely to leave. In fact, the 2025 Henley Private Wealth Migration Report forecast a staggering loss of 16 500 millionaires in 2025.
Dubai, once regarded as a destination for oil wealth and luxury tourism, has repositioned itself with remarkable strategic intent as a global hub for entrepreneurial capital, and the numbers of British business owners making that journey are rising with each passing year. This is not a story about tax avoidance in the pejorative sense, nor is it a tale of patriotic abandonment; it is, rather, a story about rational economic decision-making in a world where capital and talent have never been more mobile, and where the gap between what the UK asks of its entrepreneurs and what competing jurisdictions offer has grown wide enough to force a genuine reckoning.
The United Kingdom’s tax burden is now at its highest level since the Second World War, with overall taxation as a share of GDP forecast to reach 37.7% by 2027 to 2028 according to the Office for Budget Responsibility.
For entrepreneurs specifically, the changes to Capital Gains Tax introduced in the October 2024 Budget raised the higher rate on business asset disposals from 20% to 24%, while Business Asset Disposal Relief, the concession previously known as Entrepreneurs’ Relief, will see its effective rate climb to 14% by April 2026. Against that backdrop, the proposition Dubai extends to the same cohort is arresting in its simplicity: there is no personal income tax, no capital gains tax, and no inheritance tax. For a founder who has spent a decade building a business and is contemplating either reinvestment or exit, the arithmetic is not abstract but transformative.
The structural advantage of reinvesting on your own terms
What makes Dubai’s appeal so durable, and so distinct from earlier waves of offshore structuring, is that it is not primarily about concealment but about velocity.
What this means is that when a British entrepreneur exits a business or takes a significant dividend in the UAE, capital that would otherwise be remitted to HMRC can instead be redeployed immediately into the next venture, into hiring, into research and development, or into acquiring a competitor.
The compounding effect of retaining that capital inside the business cycle rather than surrendering a substantial portion to the Treasury is enormous over time, and it is this reinvestment logic that increasingly drives the conversation among serious founders rather than any desire for a quieter life in the sun. The UAE introduced corporate tax at a rate of 9% on profits exceeding AED 375,000 in June 2023, bringing it into line with OECD minimum standards, yet even this modest rate sits far below the UK’s 25% corporation tax rate applicable to companies with profits above £250,000. The structural gap, even after the UAE’s move toward a more conventional tax framework, remains substantial. Furthermore, when a founder relocates to the UAE personally, their salary drawn from the business can reduce the company’s taxable profits, potentially eliminating corporation tax altogether. This creates a compelling incentive not just for the business to establish in the UAE, but for founders themselves to make the move.
Additionally, Dubai’s free zones, of which there are more than 40 operating across the emirate, provide an additional layer of commercial infrastructure that British entrepreneurs find genuinely useful rather than merely symbolic. Zones such as the Dubai International Financial Centre operate under a common law framework directly derived from English law, with an independent court system that British founders find familiar and commercially legible.
The ability to own 100% of a mainland business, a reform introduced under Federal Law No. 26 of 2020, removed one of the last significant structural barriers that had previously made the UAE a more complicated proposition for foreign founders. The legislative environment has, in short, been deliberately engineered to reduce friction for exactly the kind of mobile entrepreneur that the UK is currently struggling to retain.
What the UK stands to lose
The departure of wealth-generating founders is not merely a revenue question for the Treasury, it carries a deeper cost to the innovation ecosystem that depends on serial entrepreneurs recycling capital and experience into new ventures.
Research published by the Centre for Entrepreneurs found that immigrant and emigrant founder networks are among the most productive sources of new business formation, meaning that every founder who leaves takes with them not only their own future tax contributions but also the mentorship relationships, angel investment activity, and supply chain spending that their continued presence would have generated. The UK Government’s own Invest in Great Britain programme acknowledges the importance of founder retention, yet the fiscal signals sent by successive budgets have moved in the opposite direction, tightening reliefs and raising rates at the precise moment when international competition for entrepreneurial talent has intensified.
Dubai’s positioning is, ultimately, the product of deliberate statecraft: a small jurisdiction with no oil revenues of its own making a conscious wager that attracting human and financial capital is worth more in the long run than taxing what little it might otherwise extract. For British entrepreneurs weighing their options, that wager has produced a compelling alternative. And, until the UK finds a credible answer to the question of what it offers founders beyond the market access and legal infrastructure that other jurisdictions are rapidly replicating, the flow of talent across the Gulf will continue to run in one direction.