As Western sanctions make life difficult for its elite, Russia is projected to suffer a net loss of about 15,000 people with high net worth (HNWIs) – defined as assets of more than $ 1 million – in 2022, compared with 5,500 in 2019. according to the report. That equates to about 15 percent of Russia’s millionaire population, he said. Andrew Amoils, head of research at analyst firm New World Wealth, which contributed data to the report, said Russia was “bleeding millionaires”. “Wealth migration data is a very important indicator of an economy’s health,” he told CNN Business. “It could also be a sign of bad things to come, as HNWIs are often the first people to leave … if we look at a major country collapse in history, it is usually preceded by a migration of rich people away from that country,” he added. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peshkov dismissed the report in a press conference on Tuesday, saying the Russian government had “not noticed [a] trend “of millionaires leaving the country. Immigration rates between Russia’s rich and powerful declined sharply in 2020 and 2021 as the Covid-19 shut down international travel and closed its borders. But the tendency of rich people to leave the country observed in the decade before the pandemic has been repeated and is now accelerating after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Russia’s economy is expected to shrink by about 8.5% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The West has imposed round after round of sanctions on Moscow, including the expulsion of some Russian banks from SWIFT, the global payment network, and the freezing of about half of the country’s international reserves. Dozens of Western companies, including luxury retailers, have stopped operating in the country. This year’s millionaire outflow is expected to be more than nine times higher than in 2021, according to data from Henley & Partners. “Long before the sanctions were imposed … there was a tsunami of capital that left the country, largely driven by the increasingly capricious style of governing President Vladimir Putin and his demands for loyalty from the middle class and wealthy Russians. », Misha Glenny. writer and journalist, wrote in an analysis for Henley & Partners. This year, most Russian immigrants are expected to move to southern European countries where many already have second homes. But the UAE is becoming more and more attractive to the country’s rich, in part because of their zero tax rate. The UAE is expected to overtake the United States and the United Kingdom as the top destination for millionaires traveling this year. Henley & Partners predicts the country will receive 4,000 HNWIs by the end of the year, up from about 1,000 each year before the pandemic. Amoils said the elites were attracted to the UAE as an “international business center with a high-income economy” that has a “reputation as a safe haven in the Middle East and Africa”. HNWI’s global population grew by almost 8% last year, according to research by Capgemini, a technology consulting firm that uses the same $ 1 million limit as Henley & Partners.
