Korean president cites TJN takedown of millionaire exodus myth, demands end to anti-democratic “fake news” against wealth taxes

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung condemned¹ the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry over the weekend for spreading “fake news” about millionaires supposedly leaving South Korea due to inheritance taxes after the Chamber cited in a press release the widely discredited Henley & Partners report. The President cited the Tax Justice Network’s 2025 debunking² of the report, which criticised the report for enabling “scaremongering” against wealth taxes.

“An act of generating and spreading fake news to seek private gain and attack the government deserves condemnation,” President Lee wrote on his X account.³ “I can’t believe the KCCI openly did this, even though it is an institution established under South Korean law. I will hold the KCCI responsible and ensure this does not happen again.”

The President’s post continued: “Deliberate fake news that tries to cloud the judgment of sovereign people who make policies is an enemy of democracy”.

Korea’s National Tax Service Commissioner Lim Kwang-hyun published a Facebook post citing government statistics confirming migration levels among wealthy individuals to be minimal, contradicting Henley & Partners’ claims.⁴ The Commissioner said the National Tax Service had “conducted a full analysis of reported migrants abroad for the last three years” and found that Henley & Partner’s claims are “very different from the truth”. The Commissioner concluded: “The tendency to move to a country without inheritance tax just because they have a lot of property is not being found.”

The Korean tax authority is now the second national tax authority to have contradicted the Henley & Partners’ claims with national data. The UK’s HMRC published data in August 2025 flatly contradicting claims about an exodus of non-doms.⁵

Henley & Partners announced an independent audit of its report on millionaire migrations in a Spear’s interview⁶ in August 2025 following scrutiny from the Tax Justice Network of the report’s methodology⁷ and a separate forensic accounting analysis published in the FT that concluded the report’s figures were highly likely to be fabricated⁸. The report’s own author had previously acknowledged in a 2024 BBC interview that the data the report is based on is “skewed”.⁹ To date, the tracking data the report’s claims are based on has never been made public.

The Tax Justice Network has been unable to find any mention of the audit on the Henley & Partners website. The Tax Justice Network has also been unable to find any public updates about the audit in the media or online from Henley & Partners since it was announced in August 2025.

In the meantime, Henley & Partners’ millionaire migration claims have continued to be referenced in news stories around the world. Over 900 articles citing Henley & Partners’ claims have been published to date since Henley announced the audit – the equivalent of 5 articles a day.

The claims have been covered the most in the US (256 articles), the UK (88), the UAE (78), China (44), and Brazil (27). 25 articles were published in South Korea since August 2025, almost all of which were published last week.

Half of news articles published since Henley announced the audit occurred on one day, when Henley & Partners published a press release¹⁰ that appears to have been promoted with a paid newswire distribution service on 8 December 2025 reiterating its claim about rapidly growing global wealth migration, indicating that global media coverage since Henley’s announcement of the audit remained largely driven by Henley’s proactive publication work.

Henley & Partners has also continued to publish other research and claims prepared by the same research firm it said it is auditing. The firm New World Wealth¹¹, understood to be a one-man team, authors Henley & Partner’s annual millionaire migration report titled The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report. One week after Henley announced the audit of “New World Wealth’s methodology and data”, it published The Africa Wealth Report 2025¹² prepared by New World Wealth. A month later, it published The Crypto Wealth Report prepared by New World Wealth.¹³

News coverage of the Henley & Partners report has been credited for government decisions and for discouraging governments from acting on overwhelming public support for taxing extreme wealth. The UK Labour government’s decision in January 2025 to weaken non-dom tax reform was widely reported to be a result of concerns about the Henley report’s findings.

“Rachel Reeves is to water down her crackdown on the non-dom tax status after analysis showed it had prompted an exodus of millionaires,” Sky News reported last year.¹⁴ “The U.K. is to soften some planned changes to its controversial non-dom tax rule following concerns of a millionaire exodus, the Treasury has confirmed,” reported CNBC.¹⁵

Alex Cobham, chief executive at the Tax Justice Network, said:

“Governments should follow South Korea’s lead and start listening to the evidence, instead of the scaremongering of lobbyists. The data shows that extreme wealth chokes economies, makes everybody else poorer and weakens democracies.¹⁶ Studies confirm that tax has little to no impact on where the wealthiest choose to live.¹⁷ Most millionaires say they support wealth taxes in poll after poll and believe extreme wealth is a threat to democracy.¹⁸ In the face of all this evidence, governments should see the millionaire exodus myth for what it is – a weak attempt to pull the cashmere over their eyes.”

The Chamber issued a public apology for citing external statistics “without sufficient verification” hours after the President’s condemnation.¹⁹ Korea’s Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan announced an audit of the circumstances that led to the Chamber’s press release.²⁰

-ENDS-

Notes to editor

1. Read the president’s statement on X here.
2. The president’s X post linked to a news article on the Tax Justice Network’s takedown of the Henely & Partners report.
3. See note 1.
4. See the national tax commissioner’s post here.
5. More information about HMRC’s debunking of claims about a non-dom exodus available here.
6. See the Spears article here.
7. The Tax Justice Network found several problems with Henley & Partners’ Private Wealth Migration Report, ranging from how the findings are presented to methodological issues.
8. A study published in the FT found that Henley & Partner’s report failed several standard forensic accounting techniques used to detect suspicious patterns in datasets that indicate manually entered or adjusted numbers. The study concluded that the Henley report’s numbers are highly likely to be “fabricated”.
9. The Henley report’s author Andrew Amolis acknowledged in an interview with BBC More or Lessthat the report’s sample is skewed. A transcript of the interview is available in our report (see page 9).
10. The press release appears here on the Henley & Partners website and is reproduced on the Yahoo! News website under a “GlobalNewswire” label, with a disclaimer stating “This is a paid press release.”
11. New World Wealth’s website available here.
12. See The Africa Wealth Report 2025 here, published 26 August 2025.
13. See The Crypto Wealth Report 2025 here, published 23 September 2025.
14. See the Sky News article here.
15. See the CNBC article here.
16. Research shows large rise in wealth among the 1% in the US over the past 40 years did not lead to more investments, and instead resulted in dissaving among non-rich households. Research also shows that “a large rise in inequality generates a saving glut of the rich, which can push an economy into a debt trap characterized by low interest rates, high debt levels, and output below potential”. Indebtedness of non-wealthy households brought on by extreme wealth of the richest households brings about lower productivity. Conversely, another study found that wealth taxes resulted in more investments. Research shows large rise in savings among the 1% in the US over the past 40 years brought on dissaving among non-rich households. A G20 report authored by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz concluded that the rise of extreme wealth is a “threat to democracy”.
17. See the literature on migration surveyed in our report, Taxing extreme wealth: what countries around the world could gain from progressive wealth taxes (Alison Schulz & Miroslav Palanský), 2024, Tax Justice Network. Also, a see this London School of Economics study that found the vast majority of Britain’s extremely wealthy people would never leave the country for tax reasons, partly due to the stigma involved in doing so, and partly because they think lower-tax jurisdictions are “boring”.
18. See Patriotic Millionaires UK’s poll finding majority support among UK millionaires for a wealth tax, and Oxfam’s polling finding that nearly three-quarters of millionaires polled in G20 countries support higher taxes on wealth, and over half think of them extreme wealth is a “threat to democracy”.
19. See the Chamber’s apology here.
20. See the Industry Minster’s announcement of an audit here.