The billionaires who do pay their bills, including James Dyson and JK Rowling
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Louise Thomas
Editor
As the tax row rages on, the lines between good and bad celebrity earners are being drawn and two billionaires have emerged as tax angels – paying their full share in recent years.
James Dyson and the Harry Potter author JK Rowling are two billionaires living in Britain whose tax bills are a proportionate reflection of their vast incomes.
Among the 54 billionaires resident in 2006 (the most up-to-date figures) a total of £14.7m was paid in tax. Mr Dyson alone paid £9m of that. In 2010, Dyson's company paid 88 per cent of its total tax bill in Britain, giving the Exchequer £50m.
Rowling has eloquently described why she feels compelled to pay her full taxes as a UK resident. "I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons," she said.
"The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain's; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating expats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.
"A second reason was that I am indebted to the welfare state... When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major, was there to break the fall."
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