GUY ADAMS on how Sir James Dyson made a catastrophic blunder

Gags were bouncing around cyberspace yesterday amid news that Sir James Dyson is transferring his corporate HQ from Britain to the morally-wonky tax haven of Singapore. ‘Need a moral vacuum?’ read one. ‘Get a Dyson!’

Whether this grandstanding Brexiteer minds being accused of ‘staggering hypocrisy’, as one MP put it, is anyone’s guess.

For, at 71, having built a self-made family fortune estimated at £9.5 billion, he can certainly afford to insulate himself from the slings and arrows of public opprobrium.

With a global portfolio of homes including a £20 million London town house, a £3 m chateau in Provence with its own vineyard, a £50million penthouse apartment in New York, and a 51-bedroom stately home in Gloucestershire boasting orangeries, lakes and a 300-acre park designed by Capability Brown, Sir James is well able to ride out any economic turmoil that Britain’s current political paralysis may spawn.

Critics will doubtless carp about the trappings of his wealth, arguing that they have divorced this headline-prone Knight of the Realm from the realities faced daily by our nation’s hard-pressed workers.

Sir James Dyson, pictured with his wife Lady Deidre, is transferring his corporate HQ from Britain to the tax haven of Singapore

Sir James Dyson, pictured with his wife Lady Deidre, is transferring his corporate HQ from Britain to the tax haven of Singapore

This successful captain of industry should be a walking advertisement for independent Britain’s ability to prosper on the global stage. Pictured: building containing his £50m apartment in NYC

This successful captain of industry should be a walking advertisement for independent Britain’s ability to prosper on the global stage. Pictured: building containing his £50m apartment in NYC

Certainly, a man who has a helipad in his landscaped garden, a £40 m Gulfstream jet in his personal hangar, and a vast yacht called the Nahlin makes an easy target for those seeking to smear leading Brexiteers as self-interested elitists.

(The yacht, incidentally, was built in 1930, had once scandalously transported Edward VIII and his married lover Wallis Simpson around the Adriatic, and was restored by Sir James at a cost of £25 m).

But that is, of course, what makes Dyson’s recent manoeuvres so very maddening.

On paper, this successful captain of industry should be a walking advertisement for independent Britain’s ability to prosper on the global stage.

A buccaneering entrepreneur, Sir James has leveraged a handful of ingenious ideas and plenty of single-minded determination to create a multi-national corporation that employs more than 9,000 people, turns over £3.5 billion a year and makes products used in households across the world.

He’s also tirelessly beaten the drum for British manufacturing and engineering, putting his money where his mouth is by hiring thousands of young graduates and building an institute of engineering and technology on a disused airfield near his former company HQ, in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, where thousands more will hopefully be trained.

Yet, with one ill-judged, and appallingly timed, act of corporate desertion, that noble legacy now looks hopelessly tarnished.

To a degree, we’ve been here before. Back in 2002, for example, Sir James announced he was moving production of his vacuum cleaners to Malaysia, making 800 loyal members of staff redundant in the process. The following year, he and Deirdre, his wife of more than 50 years, decided to pocket some £17 m in dividends from the firm.

At 71, Sir James has built self-made family fortune estimated at £9.5 billion. He owns this vast yacht, called the Nahlin, which was built in 1930 and once scandalously transported King Edward VIII and his married lover Wallis Simpson around the Adriatic

At 71, Sir James has built self-made family fortune estimated at £9.5 billion. He owns this vast yacht, called the Nahlin, which was built in 1930 and once scandalously transported King Edward VIII and his married lover Wallis Simpson around the Adriatic

The cash helped them buy magnificent Dodington Park in Gloucestershire the following year. But with its 51 bedrooms, 40 bathrooms and ten reception rooms, the stunning pile — with a Grecian portico and ten Corinthian columns on its façade — must have come across as a vast stately V-sign to the recently-sacked workers, many of whom lived nearby.

Sir James seemed unfazed, though. Asked how he and Deirdre managed to track each other down, given the building’s sheer size, he told an interviewer: ‘It is a real problem. We have to go looking for one another!’

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, meanwhile, Sir James was at the centre of another awkward PR kerfuffle, after Greenpeace revealed that he’d just netted some £1.6 m in EU farming subsidies in a single year.

The cash was paid to Beeswax Dyson Farming Corporation, a firm he’d set up to manage the swathes of farmland he’s acquired.

With around 25,000 acres under the organisation’s control, primarily in Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, he’s now believed to be England’s biggest private landowner, with more rolling acres than even the Queen.

Aside from the inevitable allegations of hypocrisy for taking EU cash, not to mention the harrumphing of Left-wing critics who believe very wealthy plutocrats ought to be denied public subsidies on principal, this particular affair also raised the tricky issue of tax avoidance.

For cynics were quick to point out that, unlike other property holdings, farmland makes a cute investment for wealthy men of a certain vintage, since it happens to be exempt from inheritance tax.

Like many canny businessmen, Sir James has long demonstrated a willingness to minimise his personal tax liabilities via creative but perfectly legal means. Given his political profile, this, too, has spawned controversy. In 2015, the Guardian revealed that various parts of his business empire were registered in the tax haven of Luxembourg. And last October, it emerged that he’d

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