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Informa chief executive Lord Stephen Carter has moved his residency from the UK to the UAE and retired from the House of Lords in order to run the FTSE 100 data and events company from one of its fastest-growing regions.
Carter, who served as chief of strategy to former prime minister Gordon Brown, is one of up to half a dozen Informa executives to have moved to different company offices overseas over the past 12 months.
Among the departees is chief operating officer Patrick Martell, who has moved to New York, and the head of Informa’s TechTarget unit, Gary Nugent, who has relocated to Boston.
The extent to which Carter will benefit from potential tax savings by moving from Britain to the UAE could not be established, although one person close to Informa said the move was driven by business priorities.
Relocating key executives to different countries is an unusual move, even for a global company.
Informa has been the subject of speculation among bankers that it could join the ranks of London-listed companies shifting to New York.
The company, which also owns academic publishers, makes just under 5 per cent of its revenues in the UK, compared with 43 per cent in North America and 36 per cent in India, the Middle East and Asia.
Informa’s board last year approved plans for the executive relocations, some of which are detailed in filings made this summer at UK Companies House, according to a person close to the company. The person added that Informa’s senior executives had already been spending less and less time in the UK.
Other FTSE 100 bosses have lived overseas while running their British companies, such as AstraZeneca chief Pascal Soriot, who is resident in Sydney, Australia.
Both Carter and Martell are expected to stay abroad for two years, according to the person, whereas Nugent’s relocation is seen as a longer-term arrangement.
Informa said the company “has grown fourfold over the last decade, becoming an increasingly international business. The operating management are spending their time where the market is and where the growth is”.
Carter was the founding chief executive of media regulator Ofcom and has led Informa since 2013, making him one of the longest serving FTSE 100 bosses.
The executive — whose full title is The Lord Carter of Barnes — was appointed to the House of Lords by Brown in 2008 in order to serve as a minister in the Labour government.
He retired from the Lords in March but retains his title. Members must be resident in the UK for tax purposes.
Informa said its Saudi events joint venture, Tahaluf, was generating more than $250mn in revenues and growing at more than 20 per cent a year.
At the start of this year, it announced a plan to combine Tahaluf with an exhibition business owned by the government in the UAE, which it hopes will boost revenues to close to $1bn in the region.
The UAE has recently attracted other business people from the UK following the Labour government’s policies targeting the wealthy, including the abolition of “non-dom” status, which previously shielded worldwide assets from inheritance tax.