Article by Lewis Clennell, the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Achieve Professionals, having built the business across the UK, US, Europe and the Middle East with a background in hospitality and international business management.
News broke this week that Chris Rokos, one of Britain’s largest individual taxpayers, reportedly paying close to £330 million a year is moving his tax residency to Greece. Most of the coverage has focused on the number. Greece’s flat €100,000-a-year charge on foreign income, available for up to 15 years, makes the maths simple, a rounding error next to what he was paying in the UK.
But buried further down in most of these articles is a detail that matters more to us than the tax line- the £175 million restoration of Tottenham House in Wiltshire. Savills has previously estimated the completed estate will need around 69 staff to run it, including butlers, housekeepers, chauffeurs, security, grounds teams among them. Estates like that don’t run on capital – they run on people.
The Move Nobody Reports
When a principal shifts residency, it’s never just the principal who moves. The family office moves and the property portfolio gets reshaped. And the household, with its estate manager, house manager, chef, butler, security, grounds team either relocates, gets rebuilt from scratch in the new jurisdiction, or has to keep a UK residence running to a standard nobody is now living up to day to day.
Rokos isn’t an outlier. Fredriksen, Mittal, Björgólfsson, the Revolut founders – the list of high-net-worth relocations out of the UK keeps growing. Each one is a hiring event but none of them make the press release.
What “The Household” Actually involves
This is the part that gets flattened in the commentary. A household isn’t a single hire, it’s a structure, often built up over years, sometimes decades where every role depends on the others. The estate manager coordinates the grounds team. The house manager runs alongside the chef and the housekeeping staff. Security works to the family’s actual routine, not a generic brief.
Rebuilding that structure in a new country isn’t like opening a satellite office. It means:
- Sourcing candidates in a market where the family has no existing network or reputation
- Vetting for discretion and trust at the same standard as the UK team, often faster than is comfortable
- Navigating local employment law, visas, and household payroll in an unfamiliar jurisdiction
- Managing the emotional and practical reality that some long-serving staff won’t or can’t relocate
None of that happens on the timeline a tax adviser works to.
Two Things Worth Flagging
Plan the people alongside the tax advice, not after it. A new principal residence in Athens or Milan needs a team on the ground before completion, not three weeks after. Recruitment for senior household roles including estate managers, chefs, security leads takes time to do properly, and it can’t be an afterthought bolted onto the relocation timeline. The families who get this right are briefing recruitment partners like Achieve Hospitality at the same stage they’re briefing lawyers and accountants.
Protect the long-service staff you already have. An estate manager who has been with a family for twelve years knows things no handover document captures, for example how the house runs, how the family likes things done, where the risks are. Losing them in a relocation is a far more expensive mistake than most principals realise, and it’s usually avoidable with the right planning. This would be honest conversations early, relocation support where relevant, and a genuine effort to keep them rather than assuming they’ll simply follow.
The Real Cost of Getting It Wrong
A botched relocation doesn’t just cost money in recruitment fees and false starts. It costs continuity, the quiet, unglamorous reliability that makes a household function without the family having to think about it. Rebuilding that trust from zero, in a new country, under time pressure, is a much harder and more expensive problem than most principals plan for.
Relocation is a tax decision on paper. In practice, it’s a staffing project, and one that deserves the same lead time as the legal and financial work around it.
If you’re navigating a relocation like this, whether it’s for a principal, a family office, or an estate we’re happy to talk it through. Get in touch with our recruitment specialists in family office.Â