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Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan will have more than £2m seized by police after the brothers were accused of being “serial tax evaders” who “didn’t pay a penny” of tax on £21m of income.
A judge ruled against the brothers after Devon and Cornwall Police filed a civil suit against them and a third person – referred to only as J – for unpaid taxes from their online businesses and OnlyFans accounts.
Chief Justice Paul Goldspring said what appeared to be a “complex financial matrix” was in fact a “simple revenue fraud”.
Responding to the verdict, Andrew Tate accused the authorities of “total theft”, adding that they “froze my accounts for over two years and now they have seized everything they could”.
In a statement, he said: “This is not justice; it is a coordinated attack on anyone who dares to challenge the system. Speak out against the Matrix and they will come for your freedom, your reputation and your life.”
Devon and Cornwall Police welcomed the magistrates’ decision.
“From the outset, we aimed to show that Andrew and Tristan Tate evaded tax and laundered money through bank accounts located in Devon,” a force spokesman said in a statement.
“The investigation focuses on significant earnings made between 2014 and 2022, during which we believe no tax or VAT was paid on those funds. Furthermore, both individuals are alleged to have concealed the origin of their income by channeling money through ‘front’ accounts, representing criminal activity and bringing in those proceeds of crime.”
A spokesman said the police would not comment further, including their process for beginning refunds, until the 28-day appeals period had ended.
Judgment comes after that the force made an offer to recover unpaid taxes from seven frozen bank accounts linked to the brothers at 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, especially Andrew Tate, are brazen about it.”
In total, it was claimed the brothers paid no tax in any country on £21m of online business income between 2014 and 2022.
Ms Clarke quoted 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 eventually they go away”.
Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer and social media influencer, is awaiting trial in Romania on separate criminal charges for human trafficking, rape and the formation of a criminal group to sexually exploit women.
The proceeds were said to have come from their CobraTate, Hustlers University and The War Room schemes, the court heard.
Ms Clarke said the money was “laundered around UK bank accounts” to create a “spaghetti trail” to make it impossible to sort out what was owed to the taxman and what was not.
“That’s what tax evasion looks like, that’s what money laundering looks like,” she said in court.
However, the brothers’ solicitor, Martin Evans KC, said it was to be expected that a number of payments would be made from their Stripe account – the payment platform used to generate income from their online business.
He claimed that the movement of money in numerous transfers from the payment platform to Tates was “completely orthodox”.
“There is no mystery, for any online sale there must be some form of payment provider or platform.”
If the Tate brothers wanted to distance themselves from the money, they did an “extremely bad job” of transferring it to accounts in their own names, he added.
The brothers spent the money on a number of “exotic 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 have been frozen at the time.
Additional reporting from the Press Association