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Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have to forfeit more than £2m from seven frozen bank accounts after the brothers were accused of being “serial tax evaders” who have “not paid a penny” in tax on £21m in revenues.
A judge ruled against the brothers after Devon and Cornwall Police brought a civil claim against the brothers and a third person referred to only as J over unpaid tax from their online businesses and OnlyFans accounts.
The ruling comes after the force made a bid to claw back approximately £2.8m in unpaid taxes from seven frozen bank accounts linked to the brothers in a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in July.
Sarah Clarke KC for Devon and Cornwall Police told the hearing: “Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate are serial tax and VAT evaders. They, in particular Andrew Tate, are brazen about it.”
It was claimed that they paid no tax in any country on £21m revenue from businesses online earned between 2014 and 2022.
Ms Clarke quoted from a video posted online by Andrew Tate, in which he said: “When I lived in England I refused to pay tax.”
The court heard he said his approach was “ignore, ignore, ignore because in the end they go away”.
The former kickboxer and social media influencer is awaiting trial in Romania on separate criminal charges of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women.
Revenues were said to have been generated from their schemes Cobratate, Hustlers University and The War Room, the court heard.
Ms Clarke told the court they had never registered for tax or VAT, save for one declaration in Romania for a company called Talisman Enterprises, for which no tax was paid.
The disclosures for that company were a “work of fiction”, Ms Clarke told the court.
She said Andrew Tate, 37, spends “a lot of time bragging” in web interviews about his money and the brothers are known to enjoy “all the accoutrements of extraordinary wealth”, including property and vehicles.
“And one of the reasons that they have all of those things is, unlike everybody else, they believe that they don’t have to pay tax,” she added.
The court also heard that the brothers had “a huge number of bank accounts” in the UK, seven of which have been frozen.
Ms Clarke said that money was “washed around UK bank accounts” to create a “spaghetti trail” to make it impossible to disentangle what’s owed to the tax man and what isn’t.
“That’s what tax evasion looks like, that’s what money laundering looks like,” she told the court.
However, a lawyer for the brothers, Martin Evans KC, said that it was to be expected that a number of payments would be made out of their Stripe account – a payment platform used to deal with revenue from their online businesses.
He argued the movement of money in numerous transfers from a payment platform to the Tates was “entirely orthodox”.
“There’s no mystery, for any internet sales there has to be some form of merchant provider or payment platform.”
If the Tate brothers had wanted to distance themselves from the money, they did “a singularly bad job” because they moved it into accounts in their own names, he added.
The brothers spent money on a number of “exotic motor cars” but nothing illegal, he told the court.
Gary Pons, for J, argued that the funds in the Gemini account were in cryptocurrency and therefore could not be frozen at that time.
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