HEDGE-FUND BOSS Crispin Odey has threatened to move his firm out of Britain to avoid the 50% income-tax rate on high-earners.

He joins a growing list of Britain’s wealthy businessmen and City financiers, including Hugh Osmond and Peter Hargreaves, who have become disenchanted at the new tax rate and the European Union’s proposed changes to regulation of private equity and hedge funds.

“We are seriously considering leaving,” said Odey, who runs the £3 billion Odey Asset Management. “This government is not interested in keeping London alive as a financial centre. Hedge funds are not yet flying but they are fluttering. Everyone is thinking about leaving.”

Odey, who made a fortune from short-selling British banks last year, is one half of the “Posh and Becks” of finance. His wife Nichola Pease is deputy chairman of JO Hambro and as a scion of one of the founding families of Barclays – where her brother-in-law John Varley is chief executive – is a City blueblood.

Odey feels his industry has been abandoned by the government as it focuses on winning over Labour core voters ahead of next year’s election.

“We no longer have any defence against the French and the Germans [who played a heavy hand in drafting the EU directive]. There is a great sense that the City is much less prized than it was,” he said.

He fears Geneva, Europe’s second hedge-fund hub after London, is “almost closed” as firms scramble to expand offices or secure new ones in the Swiss canton. Zurich, Monaco, Gibraltar, Hong Kong and Singapore are seen as possible destinations.

Odey, whose team of 50 operates out of a period building in Mayfair full of antiques and art, joked that as long as the rivers were stocked with salmon and the valleys with pheasants, he would move anywhere.

Charles Price, founder of the fund of hedge funds business Palmer Capital, admitted that he was also weighing up his options. “Firms have no choice but to consider moving given the lack of clarity about the regulatory environment.”

Kinetic Partners, which specialises in moving hedge funds to Switzerland, has been inundated with enquiries since the recent EU directive. Kinetic’s David Butler said he was advising 15 hedge funds that are “actively” considering leaving.

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