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Addison Lee founder Sir John Griffin ordered to pay £20.5m in tax after losing non-dom battle
Sir John Griffin, the founder of private hire operator Addison Lee, has lost a tax tribunal battle against HM Revenue and Customs and must pay more than £20.5m in additional tax after judges ruled he was domiciled in England and Wales throughout the tax years in dispute, not Ireland as he had claimed.
In a decision published on 15 September 2026, the First-tier Tribunal (Tax Chamber) dismissed Griffin's appeal against HMRC assessments covering the tax years 2013/14 to 2019/20, finding that his total tax liability across those years increased by £20,537,671.97.
Tribunal judges Michaela Snelders and Gill Hunter found that Griffin had either inherited an English domicile of dependence from his father, which became a domicile of choice when he reached adulthood in 1963, or had in any event independently acquired an English domicile of choice by 5 April 2013 at the latest.
Griffin founded Addison Lee in 1975 and built it into a private hire operator with an annual turnover of around £300m by 2012, employing about 4,500 drivers and 1,000 support staff, according to the tribunal's findings. He sold his majority shareholding to the Carlyle Group in April 2013 for a reported £300m, a transaction that falls within the tax years now in dispute. His son Liam Griffin later served as the company's managing director and chief executive before leading a consortium that reacquired Addison Lee in 2020.
The tribunal accepted that Griffin had a genuine emotional attachment to Ireland, where his parents were born, but concluded that this did not amount to a domicile of choice under UK tax rules. England became his permanent and settled home, the judges said, noting that it was in England that he established his career, raised his family, acquired property, built a business and remained for the rest of his life. A person may retain deep affection for their country of origin, may regularly visit it and may even hope one day to live there, the panel added, while nevertheless acquiring a domicile of choice elsewhere.
Griffin's stated intentions to relocate to Ireland were found by the tribunal to be imprecise and vague, with no detailed plans in place before his involvement in Irish television projects after 2013. Evidence before the tribunal noted that Griffin spent only eight nights in Ireland during 2015, a pattern judges found inconsistent with a genuine intention to permanently relocate there. Griffin did not give oral evidence at the hearing, held over four days in July 2026, with the tribunal record citing his cognitive decline.
According to reporting on the case, Griffin told the tribunal he was besotted with Ireland and infatuated with Ireland, and believed he had always been and remained Irish, though the panel found this attachment never crystallised into a sufficiently definite intention to establish an Irish domicile. Non-domiciled tax status, which allowed UK residents to avoid tax on overseas income and gains if their permanent home was deemed to be outside the UK, was abolished from April 2025.
The ruling adds Griffin to a small number of high-profile domicile disputes to have reached the tax tribunal in recent years and is likely to be of interest to other long-standing UK residents who have claimed non-domicile status based on ties to their country of birth.
It is not yet known whether Griffin intends to appeal the decision to the Upper Tribunal.
