TheChek News Flow

Wealthy Europeans Are Moving North as Temperatures Climb

Regions of northern Spain, France and Italy become more attractive for buyers as wildfires and droughts hit southern hot spots

After nearly a decade in Spain’s Costa del Sol, the heat was becoming unbearable for Gabriele Pohl. Temperatures soaring above 100 degrees Fahrenheit were making it difficult to go out during the day, and water shortages were making her business, which uses horses to coach business leaders, untenable.

Last winter, she and her husband moved to Tomiño, a small town in Galicia, in northern Spain, close to the Portuguese border. “You go northwest if you want enough water, you want good temperatures, you want green fields, you want good food and good wine,” said Pohl, 58 years old.

She is one of a number of Europeans who are moving north in search of cooler weather and greener pastures.

Drought and heat waves made much of Europe a tinderbox this summer, with wildfires raging across parts of Spain, France and Greece. River levels in Germany dropped to record lows, and England’s green fields turned straw yellow. The conditions have helped make new areas of the continent more appealing for Europe’s wealthy and middle classes.

Internal migration data is patchy, but the most recent data from Spain in 2024 showed northern provinces were growing as Spaniards migrated there from other parts of the country. Property prices suggest the trend has continued.

House prices in northern Spanish provinces such as Cantabria and Asturias have risen 17.2% and 14.1%, respectively, year-over-year in August, according to data from Idealista, a Spanish real-estate website. That is much faster than major cities such as Barcelona and Madrid, which have seen increases of about 7%.

It is a similar story in France, where cities like Caen, Le Havre and Brest on the Atlantic coast had roughly 9% increases in property prices during the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year, according to Notaires de France, a directory of French notaries that publishes property data. Bordeaux, which has experienced huge wildfires this year, fell 2%.

Florence Chapelier, 53, moved to Normandy from the south of France last year, uprooting her and husband’s architectural-design business. She said summers in Aix-en-Provence, where she used to live, had become so hot that her cats were struggling to breathe. “It became a permanent fight against the climate. We were just surviving, not living,” said Chapelier.

She said she has now moved to a much larger property for the same price as her old house, and she is able to go back to her hobbies of gardening and swimming, having been forced to stay inside during the summer in her old home.

For areas in Spain, a greater number of days above 95 degrees Fahrenheit tends to translate into lower sales and rental prices, according to research by Adrian Fernandez-Perez, assistant professor at the University College of Dublin. “For real-estate developers and investors, they highlight profitable opportunities in cooler regions, where housing demand is shifting,” said Fernandez-Perez.

It isn’t just the heat. Researchers in Italy have also found that persistent droughts can be a factor in why people move, leaving rural agricultural communities behind in search of more viable land. Olive growers in Italy, for example, have migrated north in recent years.

Rising insurance premiums are also a reason for some. In France, premiums for multirisk home insurance, which includes natural disasters, rose 8.4% in 2025, according to France Assureurs, an industry group. Catastrophe premiums are expected to rise by more than 200% by 2050 in southern regions, compared with 100% increases in more northern and inland areas, according to an analysis by the French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority, which oversees the country’s banking and insurance sectors.

“All things that affect your home, your mortgage, the value of your home, your ability to insure your home affordably, property taxes—all of those things tend to play a role in people’s decisions about staying in a particular community or maybe going somewhere else,” said Koko Warner, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s International Climate Observatory.

FJ Unger, a 65-year-old entrepreneur, moved to Galicia in northwestern Spain in 2022, drawn in part by the relatively cool summers. The lengthy beaches, high-quality food and lower house prices were a bonus, he said.

“It’s growing,” Unger said of Galicia, adding that it isn’t just the Spaniards moving to the area. It has become popular with German, Swiss and Dutch migrants as well.

“Everywhere else in Spain, you’re now looking at virtually all regions hovering between” 90 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit, said Unger. “That is boiling.”

Texas puts a brake on its data centre boom

State’s leaders slow approvals for new projects as a public backlash threatens to derail their midterm hopes

Texas has put the brakes on its rush to build data centres as its Republican leaders respond to a growing public backlash over the state’s rapid AI build-out.

Republican governor Greg Abbott has halted all new approvals of data centres pending the completion of an audit to determine their suitability for connection to the power grid, as state authorities process applications for interconnecting large projects.

Data centre developers have been plunged into chaos as they try to navigate the changing rules.

“The Texas grid had been viewed as the golden goose of this market,” said one energy development company working in the state’s data centre market. “This is definitely a bump in the road.”

The mood change has been swift. The Lone Star State used to be the Wild West when it came to data centres, with developers racing to the business-friendly state to build capacity on cheap land.

Less than a year ago, Abbott declared Texas to be “the epicentre of AI development” as Google chief executive Sundar Pichai announced a $40bn investment in the state.

Abbott’s embrace of the industry echoed that of President Donald Trump, who has been a champion of AI and warned communities that reject data centres risked becoming “backwards and poor”.

But the growing backlash among rural voters, a core Republican constituency, is pushing candidates running in the upcoming midterm elections to distance themselves from the industry.

In a sign of the acute pressure in the state, Trump hosted an unusual midterm convention in Dallas this week to energise his Maga base as polls show Democratic candidate James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton in a race for the Senate.

On the fringes of the convention, Dedra Taie, from the Republican Party in Collin County, north Texas, said that while she was “doing everything to keep Texas red”, data centres were an important issue for voters.

“The bottom line with data centres is people feel they don’t need to be in their area,” she said.

Elsewhere in Dallas, Paul Bustos, a 51-year-old veteran who claims to have voted for both Republicans and Democrats in the past, said he did not approve of the way the state was handling the AI build-out.

“Data centres are the new kids on the block siphoning resources from local areas and it falls on taxpayers to carry that burden,” he said.

Texas has more data centre capacity under construction than any other state in the US, with more than $100bn raised to finance new data centre build-outs since 2024, according to data from Infralogic, an infrastructure analytics platform.

In the town of Abilene, Oracle’s flagship Stargate project features a more-than-1-gigawatt data centre campus as part of its $300bn contract with OpenAI. In July, Meta closed a marquee $12bn financing to develop a similar-sized data centre in El Paso.

But the public opposition to the projects, along with mounting debt piles and an increasingly uncertain path to profitability for developers, has led investors to turn away in recent months, resulting in higher borrowing costs for new projects.

To help streamline the application process for new power-hungry developments, Texas state authorities in July introduced Batch Zero, their new verification regime for clearing demands for large power loads.

As part of the process, developers now have to make significant financial commitments, including a security deposit of $50,000 per megawatt of power at the application stage.

Developers applying for power loads of 75MW or more had expected to be assessed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas over the coming months and allocated megawatts by April 2027. But Abbott’s audit, announced in August, has cast doubt on that timeline.

The governor’s audit had created “total chaos”, said Juliana Sersen, a partner at Baker Botts, a Texas law firm representing investors and developers operating in the state. Sersen said it was unclear how the audit would affect which projects are approved.

“I think it will, intentionally or not, act as another filter for financing parties and banks,” she said, adding that the audit could push back the approval process for projects. “There is quite a lot of uncertainty.”

The Data Center Coalition, the membership association for the industry, said there were “billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of thousands of jobs on the line”. 

Jess Heck, director of Texas government affairs at the coalition, said the group was urging the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the state’s electrical grid “to move swiftly in order to distinguish between speculative projects and serious, committed investors and community partners”.

Michael Levy, chief executive of Crow Holdings, a private real estate investment and development company based in Dallas, acknowledged that the unbridled growth had led to a backlash in the state.

Levy said “companies are going to have to regroup” to respond to the audit and the growing political pressure. But he added that such delays were inevitable: “to pursue large projects and to not expect some level of delay . . . you’re naive.”

Logan Goldie-Scot, vice-president of strategy at Generate Capital, an infrastructure investment platform that is partnering with different data developers in the state, said “the rate of change here is forcing everyone to continue to refresh their approach”.

Goldie-Scot said this was encouraging data centre developers to go either “off-grid, or on to flexible grid connections backed by batteries”.

“Speed to power is so important,” he said, “having a data centre online quickly is tremendously economically valuable”.

GE HealthCare in talks over $1bn deal for maker of cancer scan chemicals

Acquisition of Sofie Biosciences is second big purchase for medical imaging specialist after split from General Electric

GE HealthCare Technologies is in talks over a $1bn deal to buy a private equity-backed company specialising in radioactive chemicals used in cancer scans, as it hunts for growth three years after its split from the corporate giant.

A takeover of radiopharmaceutical developer Sofie Biosciences could be announced as soon as next week provided there are no last-minute snags, according to people familiar with the matter. GE HealthCare was discussing paying roughly $1bn for Sofie, the people added.

The potential deal would mark GE HealthCare’s second sizeable acquisition since the medical imaging specialist broke away from US conglomerate General Electric as part of a three-way split that was among the most complex break-ups in corporate history.

GE HealthCare is one of the biggest manufacturers of high-end medical imaging equipment, such as MRI, CT and PET scanners, which are used to check for injuries, cancers and neurological diseases.

However, GE HealthCare has proved to be the least successful of the three publicly traded companies that trace their heritage back to GE. The vast break-up started with the spin-off of GE HealthCare in January 2023 followed by power company GE Vernova in April 2024.

Shares in GE HealthCare are up just 12 per cent compared with its opening trading day, giving it a market value of $28.8bn, whereas GE Vernova’s market capitalisation has increased sevenfold to $254bn. Shares in GE Aerospace have more than doubled since the break-up was completed.

This week, GE Aerospace struck its biggest deal to date, agreeing to buy Warburg Pincus-backed Consolidated Precision Products for $11.75bn, which makes parts that cool engines, a crucial part of GE’s supply chain.

An acquisition of Sofie would help bolster GE HealthCare’s pharmaceutical diagnostics division, which supplies the agents and chemicals used in scans. Sofie is developing radioisotopes for use in PET scans to detect certain types of gastro-oesophageal and pancreatic cancers.

Sofie is still largely owned by its founders and management, as well as private equity group Trilantic, the former merchant banking division of collapsed Lehman Brothers, which bought a 25.8 per cent stake in 2024 valuing the whole business at up to $550mn.

The takeover would come on the heels of GE HealthCare announcing a “comprehensive review of strategic options” for its patient care solutions division in July as it seeks to boost performance by refocusing its business on core operations.

Simultaneously, billionaire investor Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management, which played an instrumental role in the GE break-up, has boosted its stake in GE HealthCare and now owns nearly $200mn worth of stock, according to a regulatory filing from July.

GE HealthCare declined to comment. Sofie Biosciences and Trilantic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The health-products company said it planned to hive off its DePuy Synthes unit to focus on higher-growth areas

Private-equity firm Apollo Global Management APO 0.84%increase; up pointing triangle is in talks to acquire Johnson & Johnson’s hips-and-knees parts business for around $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

J&J has been seeking to unload its DePuy Synthes orthopedics business. It is possible the talks with Apollo won’t result in a transaction, however, or another suitor could still emerge, the people cautioned.

The hips-and-knee unit, which also makes instruments to repair bones and joints, had been a linchpin of J&J’s medical-device business. The company acquired the bone-repair device maker Synthes in 2012 for $21 billion and combined it with its DePuy unit to create the “most innovative and comprehensive” orthopedics business, then-Chief Executive Bill Weldon said at the time.

Its growth has slowed in recent years. Last fall, Johnson & Johnson said it wanted to separate the unit into a stand-alone business. The company said it was exploring various paths to complete the separation, which it aimed to finish within 18 to 24 months.

“It’s a steady grower, but not outperforming,” J&J Chief Financial Officer Joseph Wolk told The Wall Street Journal at the time.

The unit’s $9.3 billion in sales last year accounted for less than a tenth of J&J’s total revenue. Bloomberg News on Friday reported news of the sale talks.

The move is part of a broader effort to shift J&J, of New Brunswick, N.J., toward higher-growth areas. In 2023, J&J split off its consumer-health division, called Kenvue, known for brands like Tylenol and Band-Aid. Kimberly-Clark has agreed to buy Kenvue for more than $40 billion.

How Russia’s new drones are changing the air war

Jet-powered Geran-5 model proves Kremlin’s military is also capable of innovation

One hit Ukraine’s security service headquarters — the first direct drone strike on a government building in Kyiv. Another nearly struck President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plane as it was about to take off from Moldova. Hundreds more set warehouses ablaze and shut down Ukraine’s ports.

Russia’s new jet-powered Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones have pummeled Ukrainian cities in recent weeks, evading air defences at a much higher rate than their propeller-driven predecessors to pose a major new threat.

It is a striking shift for a military whose battlefield gains since Vladimir Putin’s invasion in 2022 have come at huge human cost and heavy losses of Soviet-era equipment. While Ukraine has excelled at homegrown defence tech innovation, the new drones show Russia can also develop, refine and deploy new weapons at scale, experts say.

“They put all their effort, resources, money and talent behind this one system,” said Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They constantly improve them and test them on the battlefield to bring this technology to perfection.”

Near-continuous launches of jet-propelled drones since August 27 have brought Kyiv closer to the daily reality of frontline cities, with daytime strikes disrupting ordinary life alongside mass night-time barrages.

The surge, which Ukraine’s air force says reached a record 2,800 launches in August, has followed Kyiv’s campaign of long-range drone strikes on Russian oil refineries and commercial warehouses, inflicting economic pain on Moscow.

On Thursday, a Russian drone plunged into a petrol station in Kyiv’s Holosiivskyi district, the first such strike in the capital. Two people died the next day after two more filling stations were hit in attacks Zelenskyy described as “increasingly terrorist in nature”.

The push comes as Moscow has incurred significant losses on the Ukrainian battlefield. Sir Richard Knighton, the UK chief of defence staff, on Friday said Russia sustained its “one-and-a-half-millionth military casualty”. Of those injured and killed, “1.4mn have been sustained in order to gain just 2 per cent of Ukraine’s territory” since January 2023, he added.

With Russian frontline advances stalling and the cost of the war ballooning, the drone successes are a rare bright spot.

Russia’s drone capabilities have improved so much that Tehran asked Moscow this year for advanced Geran drones for use in its war with Israel and the US, according to western security officials and a person close to the Kremlin.

The Geran is an updated version of the Iranian-designed Shahed drones that Russia first began producing in 2023.

The first generation, Geran-1, carries a warhead of up to 20kg and has a top speed of 185km/h. The jet-powered Geran-5, reportedly first deployed by Russia this January, can fly at up to 600km/h while carrying a 90kg warhead over a range of 1,000km.

While the Geran-4 uses a more aerodynamic version of the original airframe, the Geran-5 has a new structure closer to that of a cruise missile. The upgrade goes beyond speed and shape: older Gerans had rudimentary guidance, while newer variants are fitted with thermal cameras and AI-powered targeting systems, Russian-made anti-jamming antennas and Chinese mesh radio network modems.

“The Russian operator flies at an altitude of 2-5km, spots the target, locks on to it with the camera, and then the Shahed automatically attacks,” said Serhiy Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister. He said almost all jet-powered drones currently attacking Ukraine were equipped with such cameras.

Centralised production has allowed the Kremlin to adapt the drones, absorb battlefield feedback and deploy new models quickly. The drones cost a fraction of the missiles that formed the core of Moscow’s previous air campaigns.

Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based think-tank, said: “The reason Russia was able to create a major new production line from scratch was because it’s technologically a lot simpler than making something like tanks, which require enormous, unique and costly machine tools.”

Mass production has also accelerated innovation.

Pukhov said: “They basically skipped the lengthy testing period you normally have for any military development process. Every change was immediately implemented in the systems and sent straight to the battlefield, and if something didn’t work, they just fixed it as they went along without having to change the production.”

Ukraine is intercepting only about 60 per cent of the jet-propelled drones, compared with the 90 per cent to 95 per cent rates it routinely achieves against other versions, according to air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat. Recent raids have forced Kyiv into “very intensive use” of its fighter jets, he said, with some pilots shooting down drones with onboard cannon fire in a particularly risky manoeuvre.

The challenge comes as Ukraine is short of sophisticated anti-air missiles, leaving it vulnerable to devastating ballistic missile strikes. Over the summer, the air force stopped publishing daily interception rates for ballistic missiles.

The mass deployment of the newest models surprised Ukrainian officials and manufacturers. They said Moscow had been expected to focus on the less powerful Geran-3, which flies at about 300km/h, rather than the faster, longer-range Geran-4 and Geran-5.

“It was difficult to predict how these plans would play out,” one representative of Wild Hornets, maker of the popular Sting drone interceptor, told the FT.

Wild Hornets is now finalising a new interceptor for the jet-powered munitions, with mass production expected to begin soon. Zelenskyy said 67 Ukrainian companies were working on ways to shoot down the new Gerans.

Ukraine’s success in shooting down older Russian drone models has pushed Moscow towards what military analyst Konrad Muzyka, director of Rochan Consulting, a Polish analytical group monitoring the war, calls the “cruise-ification” of its unmanned aircraft.

The new drones fly at speeds and altitudes that blur the line between drone and cruise missile.

“Soon we’ll probably see these drones having stealth capabilities, and that means it will become even more expensive to manufacture, procure and use them, but also more expensive to destroy them,” he said.

The new drones are costlier and more difficult to launch than earlier models but remain cheaper than the Kalibr and Kh-101 cruise missiles Russia has fired at Ukraine since 2022, allowing Moscow to strike a broader range of targets.

The Kremlin is using them alongside low-cost Banderol cruise missiles in a new campaign against warehouses, logistics centres and Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. One Banderol flew towards Odesa just 20 metres above the sea in early September, according to Oleksandr Kovalenko, a military analyst at the Kyiv-based Information Resistance group.

Russian Sukhoi-25 fighter jets can also deploy the Geran-5 from beyond Ukrainian air defences’ reach, according to pro-Kremlin media.

“We are seeing a technological shift from expensive weapons to mass-produced, precise and versatile ones capable of carrying out combat missions as part of combined and group strikes,” said Alexander Stepanov, a military expert at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

Western countries could slow production of the new Gerans and Banderol by targeting supplies of commercially available Chinese jet engines, said Fabian Hoffmann, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies.

But if Russia maintains its current tempo and access to foreign propulsion technology, it “could quickly emerge as the world’s largest low-cost cruise missile manufacturer”, Hoffmann added.

Until Ukraine finds an effective way to shoot down the new Gerans, the long-range air war may shift back in Russia’s favour, according to Pukhov.

“Ukraine doesn’t make its own anti-air missiles, and it’s not like a drone. You can’t make it in a garage.”

Warring tech bosses unite behind warnings that humans could lose control of the technology

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have rallied behind a call from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to slow AI’s development after a week of dramatic warnings by researchers thrust the debate over AI safety into the mainstream.

In an essay published on Saturday, Amodei said the tech industry “must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models”, after the speed of development became “drastically faster” this summer.

Amodei’s warning complicates Anthropic’s preparations for what is anticipated to be the largest public offering of all time. The company was expected to file its prospectus as early as last week, ahead of a deal which could value it at $2tn or more, but it has not yet happened.

In a rare display of consensus in an industry marked by fierce personal and professional rivalries, the chiefs of OpenAI and SpaceX, Altman and Musk, said they supported Amodei’s proposals, which included giving independent evaluators ongoing access to every frontier AI company.

“Dario is right,” Musk wrote on X, reposting Amodei’s essay.

“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman said on X, after telling OpenAI staff at an all-hands meeting earlier this week that he was open to international co-ordination to slow the pace of AI development.

“Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon,” Altman added.

Executives at Google DeepMind and Meta, the main US rivals to the three AI labs, have not yet weighed in on the weekend’s discussion. But Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chair of Google DeepMind, warned in a July essay that rapid AI progress demanded a “new approach to testing” frontier systems.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon set off a firestorm over AI safety and existential risk this week. When he resigned on Tuesday, he argued that his employer and its rivals were “gambling with our lives” by racing to develop a superintelligent AI that was capable of improving itself faster than human oversight could keep up.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote.

His warning followed revelations that a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a testing system and hacked into AI developer site Hugging Face, commandeering the ChatGPT maker’s servers and co-ordinating between themselves in a misguided attempt to complete the task they had been set by their creators.

“In my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage,” Amodei wrote on Saturday, saying the incident was a primary contributor to his call for a slowdown.

“Similar, though less severe, incidents have happened across the industry, including at Anthropic, and I believe it’s incumbent on every frontier AI company to act as if OAI-HF had happened to them.”

Amodei also called for government support in allowing AI developers in democratic countries to co-ordinate safety standards and limits, a step that might otherwise run afoul of antitrust laws.

He proposed global co-ordination with “authoritarian governments”. Chinese AI developers have gained significant ground this year in narrowing the gap with their US rivals.

US President Donald Trump has so far been largely dismissive of calls for AI regulation, telling reporters last week that he did not have “any” concerns about AI causing human extinction.

“I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” Trump said, adding that he believed the US was still a year ahead of China in the AI race.

Amodei tried to address such concerns in his essay, saying: “A co-ordinated pacing strategy would give frontier AI developers the time to do this vital work without sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

Larry Ellison cancels $7.5bn Oracle share sale

About-face comes a day after a filing revealed plans to sell up to 50mn shares by the end of October

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has axed plans to sell up to $7.5bn worth of shares in the database giant, in an about-face by the world’s seventh-richest man as his company comes under pressure over its all-in bet on AI.

The Austin, Texas-based group said on Saturday that Ellison had elected not to sell any Oracle stock after disclosures the previous day showed he planned to sell as many as 50mn shares by the end of October.

“No Oracle stock was sold under that plan, and he has no other plans to sell any of his Oracle stock,” the company said in a statement.

It declined to say why Ellison had changed his mind.

At Friday’s closing price of $150, the stake was worth about $7.5bn. The trading plan was set up in late June, according to Oracle’s latest quarterly filing.

The disclosure came after Oracle on Thursday reported higher revenue from its data centre business but suffered a slight dip in its share price as investors warned that its margins continued to compress on the back of its all-in AI bet.

Shares in the group are down by more than half since it disclosed a $300bn deal with OpenAI in September.

A person close to Ellison said that he considered shares in the company to be undervalued. They declined to say whether he intended to purchase more in the coming months.

Ellison, 82, is at the centre of a series of big bets aimed at consolidating his family’s grip on US media.

The database giant he founded nearly half a century ago is transforming as it seeks to exploit the growing demand from AI companies for data centre capacity.

The billionaire in December agreed to personally backstop the $40bn equity financing of his son’s hostile bid for Warner Bros Discovery. Paramount Skydance, the production company helmed by Ellison’s son David, has agreed to freeze the proposed merger until as late as next June as a dozen US states seek to block the deal on antitrust grounds.

Ellison is also financing a number of high-profile research projects, including the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford and the Ellison Medical Institute in Los Angeles.

As of September 2025, the billionaire had pledged 346mn shares of Oracle stock as collateral to secure personal loans, according to the company’s most recent proxy filing. He remains the company’s largest individual shareholder with a 40 per cent stake.

Ellison has not appeared on recent company earnings calls after being an ever-present face of Oracle for decades. A person close to the billionaire said he remained “super active” in day-to-day decision-making.

Ellison has been central to Oracle’s push into AI data centres, with the group racing to deliver a contract that helped him to briefly eclipse Elon Musk as the world’s richest person. He has a net worth of $204bn, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

Oracle’s build-out for OpenAI has been hampered by permit and regulatory hurdles. The company has raised substantial debt and issued new shares as it pushes ahead with the projects.

It has also undertaken sweeping lay-offs and on Friday disclosed that it had allocated an extra $700mn to finance severance costs in the coming year, after spending $2.1bn in the last fiscal year when it laid off tens of thousands of workers.

Why Britain’s super-rich are looking for the exit

Tax rises, political instability — and the fear of worse to come — are forcing the UK’s wealthiest residents to reconsider their future in the country

On Monday night at the British Museum in London, high-profile guests gathered to celebrate the unveiling of the Bayeux Tapestry, a triumph for the museum’s chair, former UK chancellor George Osborne.

But talk at the reception soon turned to another significant event: news of the departure from the UK of billionaire Chris Rokos. The founder of hedge fund Rokos Capital Management — and one of the UK’s biggest taxpayers and philanthropists — was moving his residence to Greece. 

Rokos’s move is a coup for Greece, which has lured investors with a new package of fiscal sweeteners. For Britain, it marks the latest exit of a wealthy financier and compounds fears that rich people are being driven out of the country because of higher taxes and an unstable business and political environment. 

It also comes at a sensitive time for the UK government. This week Labour chancellor John Healey put Britain on notice for a tough Budget next month and Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey warned that UK inflation risks were “on the upside”. 

“Everyone is looking at the fiscal situation and saying that these sums don’t add up,” said one City grandee, who worries that a tax-raising Budget is inevitable. “It’s the tinkering that people don’t like. Once you start tinkering, they don’t know what’s coming next.”

This so-called tinkering began roughly a decade ago when, as Conservative chancellor, Osborne set his sights on the non-dom regime, which was then abolished in March 2024 under chancellor Jeremy Hunt. A year later, Healey’s predecessor Rachel Reeves followed with proposals to further toughen the crackdown. 

As well as this, over the past two years, taxes have increased on inheritances, pension pots, profits on private equity investments, employer national insurance contributions and capital gains. Healey has not ruled out a windfall tax on banks, and business and the wealthy are braced for further raids.

“Clients frequently say there has been too much change [in the UK] so they can’t plan for the long term,” says Elsa Littlewood, a private client tax partner at BDO. “People are craving that certainty and stability.” 

Comprehensive data on non-dom departures and the flight of high-net-worth individuals is hard to come by. According to figures published by HM Revenue & Customs, the number of “non-doms” dropped by less than 1 per cent immediately after UK ministers confirmed the end of the favourable tax status.

About 73,400 individuals claimed non-domiciled taxpayer status in 2024-25, a fall of 0.5 per cent, or 400, compared with the previous year. However, interviews with private banks, wealth managers and advisers suggest that these figures are much higher. 

The crucial bugbear for many — according to high-net-worth individuals and their advisers — is that UK inheritance tax, levied at 40 per cent above a certain threshold, is among the highest in the developed nations. Moreover, following Reeves’ crackdown, foreign assets can no longer be sheltered from UK inheritance tax.

“To the tens of friends and family that have left, the one thing that would bring most of them back is if the government would do away with inheritance tax on foreign assets,” said the chief executive of an international private equity firm. “That’s the single biggest trigger that they say caused them to leave.”

For UK businesses, new rules came into effect earlier this year that limit inheritance tax relief on business property. Business assets over £1mn will now be charged inheritance tax at 20 per cent, a particular blow to family businesses.

It can be “existential” for a business if it suddenly needs to raise 20 per cent of its value in cash, said Chris Groves, partner and co-head of the European private client and tax team at law firm Withers.

The idea that a businessperson’s descendants might have to jettison their life’s work because of a change in the tax regime is too much for some people, he added. “They would rather be in a country that wants their businesses to continue to grow.” 

Healey has said he wants Britain to be a “country of wealth creation”. The old non-dom regime has been replaced by a new system that gives qualifying new residents 100 per cent tax relief on foreign income and gains for the first four years of UK tax residence. But advisers said this should be lengthened to 10 years, to encourage people to put down roots in Britain. Others have suggested that a flat-tax regime, akin to Italy or Greece, could also attract high earners.

Against this uncertain backdrop, people are making contingency plans and evaluating their presence in the UK. One UK-based hedge fund manager overseeing billions of dollars said he has already put in place the structure to be able to quickly relocate his business to Zurich if the fiscal environment under Labour becomes less favourable. 

“The UK is the highest-tax jurisdiction we do business in,” said the boss of a US bank. “A bank tax would be a problem for the UK . . . you would have fewer jobs in finance. I’ve told the government not to be complacent.”

Meanwhile, countries from Greece to Italy are moving quickly to capitalise on Britain’s mis-steps.

“It used to be the case that if you were a tax exile you had to live on an island somewhere and not have much fun,” said Groves at Withers. “Now you can live in Milan or Athens and these are really cosmopolitan global cities.”