Gerko is UK’S top taxpayer

A RUSSIAN-BORN mathematician and City billionaire has become the UK’S highest taxpayer, racking up an estimated bill of almost £490m.

Alex Gerko, who holds British citizenship and renounced his Russian citizenship last year, is the founder of robotic trading firm XTX Markets and has an estimated fortune of £5bn.

The 43-year-old leapt up the rankings to become Britain’s number one taxpayer in 2022, with a liability of £487.4m, according to the latest Sunday Times Tax List.

He pulled in front of other top taxpayers such as Bet365 founder Denise Coates and her family, and sportswear tycoon Stephen Rubin and his family.

Robert Watts, the compiler of the Sunday Times Tax List, said Alex Gerko’s story was “extraordinary”, adding: “This was a man who could have been one of Russia’s greatest wealth creators – instead he is creating jobs and paying his tax here. Enticing the super-rich to London doesn’t always pay dividends for the public finances. In his case it certainly has.”

The list found that 100 individuals and families had each paid at least £10.7m of tax, either personally or through their businesses. Other top contributors to the public purse include Harry Potter author JK Rowling, Wetherspoon boss Tim Martin, Sting and the Duke of Westminster.

The top 10 taxpayers handed over £2.3bn to the Treasury, an increase of almost 14pc on a year earlier.

Mr Gerko was previously ranked number 10 on the list, with a contribution of £117.4m. He is a maths graduate of the prestigious Moscow State University and the New Economic School who began his finance career as a Moscow-based researcher at Deutsche Bank in 2004.

He moved to the UK in 2006 and joined hedge fund GSA Capital in 2009, before leaving in 2015 to found trading firm XTX.

XTX, which today generates annual revenues of more than $1.7bn (£1.4bn), employs so-called algorithmic trading strategies, where decisions are automated through machines, to provide liquidity to businesses, exchanges and trading venues.