Andrew Tate complained “the UK government is stealing my money” and he and his brother Tristan were branded tax evaders and lost a £2.6 million legal battle with police.
The controversial brothers have been accused of failing to pay money owed from their online businesses between 2014 and 2022.
Devon and Cornwall Police brought a case to Westminster magistrates court, arguing tax is owed on £21million of revenue from their online businesses including War Room, Hustlers’ University, Cobra Tate and OnlyFans.
On Wednesday, Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring ruled that police can seize £2.68 million held in seven frozen accounts with ties to the brothers.
Andrew Tate took to social media site X to issue a string of furious responses to the ruling, writing: “The UK government is stealing my money saying that I owe them taxes.”
In a statement, he called the court ruling “theft” and suggested they are victims of a “co-ordinated attack” by those in power which he describes as the “Matrix”.
“First, they labelled me a human trafficker, yet they couldn’t find a single woman to stand against me”, he said.
“When that narrative crumbled, they turned to outright theft — freezing my accounts for more than two years and now seizing everything they could.
“This is not justice; it’s a co-ordinated attack on anyone who dares to challenge the system.
“Speak against the Matrix, and they’ll come for your freedom, your reputation, and your livelihood.
“This raises serious questions about the lengths authorities will go to silence dissent.”
Judge Goldspring, in his ruling, said what appeared to be a “complex financial matrix” was actually a “straightforward cheat of the revenue”.
He said the Tates have failed to provide any evidence to counter the police’s application, and the case for seizing the funds was “overwhelming”.
“I am satisfied on the balance of probabilities that they have engaged in long-standing, deliberate conduct in order to evade their tax”, the judge ruled.
“In my view, one need only focus on the inescapable evidential picture to determine the case.
“The money generated by the various business were online transactions which attracted VAT in the UK and / or corporation tax to the companies and / or income tax by the respondents, and they had not so much as registered to pay or account for tax, whether personal or otherwise, let alone paid any tax.
“That, I am satisfied, was precisely the intention of (the Tate brothers) and is unequivocally founded on the evidence before me.”
In July at an earlier hearing, Sarah Clarke KC, representing the force, referenced 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”.
He told his followers on YouTube: “They start sending people around to my house - ‘where’s Andrew’ - oh he’s not here.
“Ignore ignore ignore, there becomes a point where there’s a cost benefit analysis where they sit down and go we don’t know where this guy is, we don’t even know how much money he has, we don’t know if he’s gonna pay.
“He might have left the country - this is a waste of our time.”
He also referred to a million-pound-a-month lifestyle, saying: “I was always fairly well off. But in the last three years I got to a point where money is truly not real.
“Money has no value whatsoever for me anymore. So if I want something I’ll just buy it and I’ll spend. I spend ridiculous amounts of money on stupid things.”
The brothers are accused of paying just under $12million into an account in the name of a woman identified only as J, and opened a second account in her name, even though she had no role in their businesses.
Part of the money that Devon and Cornwall Police targeted is cryptocurrency held in an account in her name.
J received a payment of £805,000 into her Revolut account, the court heard.
Of this, £495,000 was paid to Andrew Tate, and £75,000 to an account in J’s name that was later converted to cryptocurrency, it is alleged.
Gary Pons, for J, argued that the funds in the Gemini account were in cryptocurrency and therefore could not be frozen at that time.
In the Tates’ defence, Martin Evans KC said that the bank transfers made by the brothers were “entirely orthodox” for people who run online businesses.
If they 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 siblings spent money on a number of “exotic motor cars” but nothing illegal, he told the court.
The Tate brothers are currently facing a series of criminal allegations in Romania, and are set to be extradited to the UK once those proceedings are concluded to face further accusations here.
They are accused of human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to exploit women in one case in Romania, in which Andrew Tate is also accused of rape.
The Tates deny the charges.
Bedfordshire Police secured an international arrest warrant for the brothers relating to allegations of rape and human trafficking dating back to 2012-2015, which they also deny.
Andrew Tate was formerly a Big Brother contestant in 2016, and has gone on to cultivate a substantial online following.
The former kickboxer describes himself as a “misogynist”, and has been banned from TikTok, YouTube and Facebook over claims of hate speech.
However he still has a following of almost 10 million on Elon Musk’s X.
