Farrukh Dhondy | Tax-Dodgers and Many Others Use ‘Golden Visa’ To Shelter in Dubai

I have been three times to Dubai -- not to dodge taxes or even to dodge Iranian bombs. Now those who’ve gone for the former have to concern themselves with the latter.

The home office in Britain reckons that 200,000 young Britons have sought the “Golden Visa” that the UAE offers, allowing them to stay for ten years and moved, in the main, to Dubai. These young people may not all be tax-dodgers or indicted individuals fleeing from British law. They may indeed be people wanting to live in a sunny clime with rich shopping malls away perhaps from the shabby high streets of towns in some recess of the sceptred isle. And then, there’s no bother about deciding which political party to support and how to vote? Freedom from democracy!

They may be young professionals -- doctors, nurses, teachers, perhaps, who can find jobs in the English-medium schools to which Brit, American, Indian and even European expats to Dubai send their children.

If they aren’t any of these professionals and don’t run a shop in a fancy mall selling imported luxury goods, they have to belong to a class which earns its money in Britain or internationally and takes shelter in the UAE from demands for tax on their earnings. What’s not to like?

The answer, perhaps, is “Dubai and the other desert settlements of the UAE”?

Even so, perhaps in some recess of their minds or sentiments there is residual nostalgia for living in a democracy where people are not executed for being critical of the desert kingdoms or are indeed gay -- but one doubts that.

Gentle reader, I’ve only been to Dubai for a week or fortnight at a time – to work on one or other film script because its producer lives, part-time at least, in the sandy sarcophagus.

That may be an unfair description. I don’t think words, phrases or elaborate paragraphs can describe whole cities. Of course, words have been used to portray London’s Victorian or Edwardian terraces or New York’s skyscrapers, or the unusual artistic buildings that adorn all the world’s cities, but the descriptions could get purposeless and boring. Cities should be summed up in atmospheres rather than detailed descriptions of parts of them.

Having said that, I’m struggling to find an adjective that characterises the atmosphere of Dubai. “Indifferent?” maybe. “Conceited?” Hmmmmm!

“Kitschy”? it being a lot of effort and no artistic meaning apart from awe at the scale and splendour?

Like LA, Dubai seemed to me islands connected by motorways, except that those in Dubai sported buildings by the world’s A-list architects – skyscrapers surrounded by a few streets, definitely housing shopping malls.

Yes, designed. Nothing seemed to grow organically out of the history or culture of the country. History? Culture? Petro-dollars?

There is certainly an effort to get away from the barrenness of the desert with vast acres given over to efficiently watered vegetation, specially planted in imported soil to convert the desert into the semblance of a green and pleasant land. But because it is man-made, it smacks of the perfection and artificiality of AI.

When Netenhurrah and Chump began their war on Iran, it retaliated by hitting targets in the UAE. The Brit tourists who had gone there for the sunshine and artificiality were assured by the Keir Starmer government that they would be given chartered flights at the UK taxpayer’s expense to return to this green and pleasant land.

Fair enough. Except for the possibility that this transport to safety from the Iranian bombardment would also be open to those Brits who have moved to the UAE to dodge paying UK tax. A seat on a plane? Trivial sum. A thousand tax-dodgers on the evacuation plane? Still nothing to cry about as it won’t bankrupt the national exchequer. But the morality, if not the irony of it?

One of these tax-dodgers is a lady called Isabel Oakeshott, married to Richard Tice, a property tycoon who is the founder of what can be considered the National-Socialist (abbreviation anyone?) Reform Party.

The party’s programmes are vehemently “nationalistic”, anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-Muslim, anti-any liberal thought or policy… and, like a certain German regime of the past, Reform promises all manner of uncosted benefits of nationalising several facilities and institutions to attract potential voters.

Oakeshott writes “books” -- they fit the definition as they are printed words on paper bound together with covers. One of these, written in partnership with Lord Ashcroft, another tax dodger who is registered in Belize, was titled “Call Me Dave” and was a scurrilous biography of the former Tory Prime Minister David Cameron. One section of the book alleged that Cameron, as an undergraduate at Oxford, joined a fraternity which required him to perform some unsavoury sex act on a pig’s corpse. I don’t recall Cameron denying it, but that refusal to engage may have just been contempt for the allegation -- true or false.

Oakeshott says she loves Dubai. That’s reassuring. I hope she stays there!