The boss of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, has warned Andy Burnham in opposition to elevating tax fees on banks, suggesting it might threaten plans to construct its £3bn headquarters in London and drive funding away from Britain.
The chief government of the world’s largest financial institution, who has a monitor document of criticising the UK’s financial institution tax surcharge, doesn’t wish to see the UK’s new prime minister focusing on the banking business to boost further income.
“I imply, it could sound nice, ‘tax the banks’, nevertheless it’s $5bn that my shareholders paid on that further tax,” mentioned Dimon on the Grasp Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost, in an interview recorded final week and launched on Tuesday. “I simply assume issues like which have antagonistic penalties.”
Banks within the UK pay a 28% company tax fee, increased than the usual 25%, in addition to a separate levy on their UK steadiness sheets.
“I might be very cautious if I used to be a authorities considering that penalising any firm out of the extraordinary is an efficient factor for that nation,” Dimon mentioned. “I at all times thought [the UK bank levy] was fallacious.
“JP Morgan didn’t injury the UK and I referred to as the chancellor on the time. [We] didn’t injury the UK. We’re an important citizen there. We rent folks there. We wish to be greater there.”
Dimon gave the go-ahead to construct a 279,000 sq metre (3m sq ft) tower in Canary Wharf final yr hours after the banking business was spared elevated taxes in former chancellor Rachel Reeves’s autumn price range.
Nevertheless, in Might Dimon mentioned he might scrap plans to construct the £3bn tower, which can function JP Morgan’s UK headquarters and home greater than half its 23,000 UK workforce, if Keir Starmer have been changed by a brand new Labour prime minister who was hostile to banks.
He reiterated his warning on the podcast, saying he didn’t know what he would do concerning the deliberate workplace if Burnham’s authorities did increase taxes for banks.
Requested whether or not he would U-turn on the choice to construct the Canary Wharf tower, he mentioned: “That’s a binary resolution … I don’t know what I might do. I believed Rachel [Reeves] did an important job by the best way. I need London to be a contented house for a very long time.
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He added: “[The UK] ought to have a aggressive tax system … that’s constant and conducive to capital formation that may drive the expansion of a rustic.”
Commerce unions have been urging Burnham to tax wealth, and the Trades Union Congress has claimed that £9bn could possibly be raised over 4 years if the earlier Conservative authorities’s reduce to the financial institution surcharge have been reversed.
“In case you have an uncompetitive tax system, capital leaves your nation,” Dimon mentioned. “And if capital leaves your nation, it goes to different nations. And also you see that now. You see, what’s it? What number of corporations have delisted from London within the final couple of years? I wouldn’t wish to see that if I used to be operating a rustic.”
