Sir Richard Branson has said he will mortgage his private Caribbean island to raise money to help his Virgin Group empire, as he pleaded with the UK government to step in and save his Virgin Atlantic airline from collapse.
Branson, who is the UK’s seventh richest person with an estimated £4.7bn fortune, and has lived tax-free on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands for the last 14 years, promised in a public blogpost on Monday that he would “raise as much money against the island as possible to save as many jobs as possible ”.
Branson, 69, made the pledge as he tried to convince the government to give his airline a £500m loan to help it through the “devastating impact this pandemic continues to have
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While on the one hand I suppose yet again jobs will be at risk, on the other, he has made a very comfortable living out of Virgin over the years, so my sympathy is hardly going to be undiluted.
I believe I read yesterday that Denmark has refused to bail out companies registered in tax havens.
That sounds more like it.