London ballroom hosts showcase event for ‘golden passports’

Three PMs attend marketing sales event on how wealthy can snap up citizenship from $100,000

Three prime ministers took to a stage in the ballroom of a five-star London hotel this week offering the world’s wealthiest people “golden passports” and citizenship of their countries in return for hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment or flat “contributions”.

Allen Chastanet, the prime minister of the Caribbean island of St Lucia, told about 300 members of the super-rich elite and their advisers gathered at the Rosewood hotel for “global citizenship conference” that his country’s economic mission was “going after high net-worth individuals and giving them a comfortable place to live”.

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Super-rich prepare to leave UK ‘within minutes’ if Labour wins election

Wealthy see potential taxes imposed by Jeremy Corbyn as bigger threat than Brexit

The super-rich are preparing to immediately leave the UK if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister, fearing they will lose billions of pounds if the Labour leader does “go after” the wealthy elite with new taxes, possible capital controls and a clampdown on private schools.

Lawyers and accountants for the UK’s richest families said they had been deluged with calls from millionaire and billionaire clients asking for help and advice on moving countries, shifting their fortunes offshore and making early gifts to their children to avoid the Labour leader’s threat to tax all inheritances above £125,000.

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China overtakes US in rankings of world’s richest people

Credit Suisse survey shows Brexit effect has reduced number of UK millionaires by 27,000

The number of wealthy Chinese people has overtaken the number of rich Americans for the first time, according to a report by Credit Suisse.

The bank’s annual wealth survey found there were 100 million Chinese people among the world’s top 10% of richest people, compared with 99 million in the US.

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MacKenzie Bezos pledges at least half her wealth to charity

Jeff Bezos’ former wife, known as world’s 22nd richest person with $36.6bn fortune, signs up to the Giving Pledge

MacKenzie Bezos, who recently became the world’s fourth richest woman after her divorce from Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, has promised to give away at least half her $36.6bn (£28.4bn) fortune.

The 49 year-old novelist and founder of the anti-bullying group Bystander Revolution said on Tuesday that she had “a disproportionate amount of money to share” and promised to work hard at giving it away “until the safe is empty”.

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Kylie Jenner’s makeup makes her the world’s youngest billionaire

Youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner reality TV family tops Mark Zuckerberg by two years

Kylie Jenner, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner American reality TV family, has become the world’s youngest billionaire at the age of just 21.

Jenner, who grew up under the watch of TV cameras filming Keeping Up with the Kardashians, was on Tuesday admitted to the “nine-zero” fortune club by Forbes. The business magazine ranked Jenner as the world’s 2,057th richest person. She became a billionaire two years younger than the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took the title at the age of 23 in 2008.

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Super-rich sabbatical: the boom in luxury long breaks for the 1%

From shark swims to snow leopard treks, a tailored trip of up to a year is now a must-have

The super-rich are going on sabbatical. It turns out having bucket-loads of money can be stressful, leading some of the world’s richest people to take a break for a month or so, or even a year, to escape the pressure of managing their businesses or personal fortunes.

Tom Barber, the founder of the London-based travel agency Original Travel, said so many super-rich customers had asked his firm to arrange bespoke trips ranging in duration from one to 12 months that his firm was launching a special division dedicated to sabbaticals for the 1%.

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