The founder of the successful Luton-based budget airline, who no longer runs it. He is listed as a Jersey bank client. Inherited wealth from Greek-Cypriot shipowner father. He has described himself as "British by birth". His spokesman says, however: "Sir Stelios is not – and never has been – resident in the UK for tax purposes. He has been a Monaco resident since the mid-1980s (ie when he was a teenager) when his family relocated there from Athens." The inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner is worth up to £2.5bn and owns the £15m Dodington Park estate in Wiltshire. He set up a 1985 onshore children's trust to hold 30% of company shares. His spokesman said: "The trust was dissolved and the shares distributed to the beneficiaries." His wife and his three children, Sam, Jake and Emily (who runs a fashion shop in Notting Hill, west London), also appear as past beneficiaries of a offshore trust in the Channel Islands. The spokesman said that trust was never actually used, had no assets and had not avoided tax.

In 2010, Dyson transferred shares offshore to Malta, another tax haven. Following criticism, the move is being unwound. The firm said: "Dyson is a UK owned company, and paid taxes of over £100m in 2013. The administrative companies referred to in Malta will soon be inactive." The celebrated late designer moved to St Tropez at one point to avoid UK tax. Her late husband, Bernard Ashley, then set up an offshore trust in 1985, after Laura's death, and after the company went public. Five years later he sold out to foreign investors for £60m. The children appear to be named as beneficiaries. Neither their daughter Jane nor son Nick, who runs a menswear shop, wanted to comment. The late Old Etonian chairman of the shipping line P&O passed wealth down the generations. His Sir Donald Anderson Trust records beneficiaries as four grandchildren, Caspar and Barclay Fox, Tamara Onslow and Fenella Dernie. Caspar, now a 42-year-old tax lawyer in London, declined to comment. Worth up £400m and named as a Jersey offshore client.

In Britain, he occupies the £30m Rossway estate near Berkhamsted. Currently owns 40% of the Laura Ashley fashion business. His divorce battle in the UK courts with former beauty queen Pauline Chai scandalised Mr Justice Holman this year, who said it was a piece of "appalling litigation" at phenomenal expense. cute cat vacuum cleaner"Neither of them currently pays any English taxes whatsoever." bosch vacuum cleaners usaHe will be a non-dom. Peng declined to comment.bissell vacuum cleaner spare parts Jersey trusts protect the billion-pound wealth of the 83-year-old Bradford-born Morrisons supermarket founder and a large number of his family members. He declined to comment, as did his daughter Andrea Shelley, who occupies Thimbleby Hall in Yorkshire and has had held shares worth more than £300m.

Other big shareholders are his niece and her husband, Susan and Nigel Pritchard, who relocated for a while to Jersey in 1999. Was Britain's highest-paid executive the year he received £27m as head of the Logica software firm 1993-2007. The Jersey trust was a Furbs (funded unapproved retirement benefit scheme) to provide him with extra money. A government efficiency adviser, he told us: "This trust has been set up for the perfectly legitimate purpose of providing pension benefits, has been operated with full visibility to HMRC at all times and is not the subject of any dispute with HMRC. I have paid income tax on all the pension contributions made by Logica." He said he was "a UK resident taxpayer who has been meticulous in all my dealings with HMRC". More than £100m in Jersey trusts benefits at least 40 Lumley, Hemphill and St Aubyn relatives, many living in the UK. Henry Lumley, in Bagshot, Surrey, told us: "My grandfather was a successful Australian businessman who ... set up discretionary trusts for his assets and his successors in 1940.

These trusts ... comply with UK law and returns are made to HMRC in accordance with treaties set up between the two countries. If beneficiaries receive income from the trusts, they have and always will return them in their annual tax returns in the normal way and are subject to UK tax." An Australian tycoon, the late Bruce Gyngell founded TV-am and set up Jersey trusts for his wife and children – one of whom, David, was in the headlines this year for brawling with James Packer on Bondi Beach. His widow, Kathy, works for the rightist Centre for Policy Studies. She said: "I am choosing not to comment." A Lady Rothermere trust is recorded in Jersey. It appears to refer to the late Lord Rothermere's second wife, Maiko Lee, of Korean nationality. She did not respond to our invitations to comment. Rothermere's son Jonathan by his first wife inherited the Daily Mail, also through a Jersey trust, and a Bermuda-registered offshore entity. Jonathan is estimated to be worth £760m. He has not denied claiming tax concessions as a "non-dom", on the grounds that his father lived in Paris.

He resides at Ferne Park, a stately home in Wiltshire built for him by architect Quinlan Terry. The names of Bernie Madoff and of MSI (Madoff Securities International), the London end of his financial operation, are among the most unexpected entries in Kleinwort Benson's Jersey records. Madoff is serving 150 years in a federal prison for masterminding a £38bn fraud – one of the biggest ever on Wall Street. Shortly before his downfall in 2008, MSI funded one of his more notorious purchases – a £4m yacht, called the Bull, to be registered in his wife's name and moored on the French Riviera. • This footnote was added on 21 July 2014 and amended on 22 July. The Channel Islands offshore trust referred to in the section on Sir James Dyson was set up by Orbis Trustees Guernsey Limited. Kleinwort Benson purchased Orbis after the trust was wound up in 1999. Dyson is not and never has been a client of Kleinwort Benson.Cleaning up: Nick Grey, who poses with his cordless invention the Gtech, is the new James Dyson

Rumour has it that it’s practically impossible to get into the Dyson headquarters without myriad levels of security clearance.So secretive has the high-powered (in every sense) world of vacuum cleaners become that fear of espionage is rife.Dyson employees must use a fingerprint scanner to enter the building and, even then, access to most research areas is only for a select few.So when the man tipped as the next James Dyson leaps in front of me as I reach for a door handle inside his domestic appliance empire, it’s not a surprise.‘I’ll need to get that,’ says Nick Grey. Of course, he will. Are we talking fingerprints here, too? Am I going to be denied access until I swear not to divulge suction secrets to the Russians? It’s turns out we are just talking a temperamental door.‘It’s a bit stiff,’ he says cheerily, yanking it open. Welcome to the surprisingly low-tech world of Gtech, the little vacuum cleaner company that is taking on the big boys of dust-busting.Have you even heard of Gtech?

Well, it is short for Grey Technologies, a name which even Mr Grey, 45, admits doesn’t have the pizazz of Dyson.‘It’s not a very good name, is it?’ he frowns. ‘But I couldn’t think of anything. People don’t know how to pronounce it. Our customers phone up and say “I need a battery for my Getch”.’All of which makes the success of Gtech’s flagship product, a lightweight cordless vacuum cleaner called the AirRam, even more unlikely. The AirRam may look unprepossessing, and its inventor admits that it was designed with the elderly market in mind.‘The first customers were in the over-80 age bracket,’ he nods. But, as unlikely as it sounds, this machine has been, er, wiping the floor with the opposition with 32,000 of them flying off the shelves every month. And their fans love them. Not least because of their clever internal compression technology which crunches all the dirt into solid little bales which you simply tip out into the bin.  The bales are made - in rather revolutionary fashion - just a few centimetres from where the dust and dirt enters the machine, rather than having to travel through reams of tubing.

The absence of both bag and miles of tubes makes for a superlight machine too.Grey proudly shows how the AirRam can be carried with just one finger. He is, however, reluctant to reveal how he makes the bales of dirt, concerned as he is about competitors copying his technology. In the year to date, he says, the AirRam has outsold every rival cordless product. Gtech is now making lavish claims about it being the UK’s best-selling vacuum cleaner by value - hotly disputed by Dyson, of course.Sir James Dyson - the man who changed the face of the entire industry - is certainly familiar with Gtech. Last year, his company took the extraordinary step of taking full page adverts in national newspapers, claiming that Dyson’s sleek (and much sexier, it has to be said) cordless model, the DC59 Animal, boasted ten times as much suction as the AirRam. It was akin to Goliath inviting David to a duel. Dyson was also quick to pounce when Gtech insisted that their product was superior. It complained to Advertising Standards Authority, which upheld eight of the nine complaints and forced Gtech to change some wording on its adverts.

Techy: Mr Grey's vacuum empire is run from his farmhouse near Worcester ‘Yes, it was extraordinary to have the big boys come after us,’ admits Mr Grey. ‘Maybe we were a bit naïve about the wording. It never occurred to us that every word would be scrutinised by teams of lawyers.’Vacuum cleaning companies have teams of lawyers?‘Oh yes, Dyson have about 20, 17 in house.’ And how many do you have? Although the company launched in 2001, it’s only in the past three years that Gtech has come out of the shadows. Last year it had a £20million turnover. Next year’s predicted turnover, says Mr Grey, is £40million.So can you smell the success at company HQ yet? All you can smell is manure because Gtech is situated on a farm near the village of North Piddle in Worcestershire.Fifty cows stare at me as I pick my way across the yard. My mucky shoes are greeted with whoops of delight when I get inside, however. Lightweight: The AirRam is so light it can be lifted with a single finger - a fact of which Mr Grey is undeniably proud

One of the advantages of being out in the country is that people are always treading in some sort of goo,’ says Mr Grey, getting down on the floor to examine exactly what type of dirt it is (there are infinite varieties). Obviously, they do pay people to tread muck professionally. At the back of one barn is a scene which could have come straight from a Heath Robinson cartoon.Three menacing-looking vacuum cleaners are held in place over a revolving conveyor belt of carpet to test their performance. They turn on automatically for 14 ½ minutes, rest for 30 seconds, then turn themselves on again. All day and all night. Grey looks at them as one would gambolling lambs.Gtech still feels very much like the sort of business that was started in someone’s garage - which it was.Even now the products are likely to be tested by Grey asking his mother’s friends to ‘give them a whirl’.‘Yeah, you can have all the lab testing in the world, but you can’t beat trying a prototype out in someone’s home, with real dirt and dogs and children and mess.’So his home - he has four young kids - is presumably spotless? 

I test them so much we don’t have enough dirt! You need a few days build-up.We haven’t got a dog, unfortunately, so I’ve been known to stop people walking by my house with their dog to say “Can I come and clean your house?”‘Most people like it - once I’ve explained. They don’t think I’m barmy, no, not really. I mean I don’t sneak into their houses at night, doing guerrilla cleaning.’Don’t be fooled, though. This is not someone who has stumbled into success. Nick Grey’s rise has been methodical and determined.He wasn’t born with a burning desire to design vacuum cleaners. He left school with just two O-levels and got a job with leading vacuum maker Vax, which was where his love affair with appliances started. ‘I went in at the lowest level. It was my job to set up the lab for testing, get the dirt and spread it around, then clear up afterwards. I’d watch the engineers and think “I want to do that”.’ He progressed up the company, first getting his hands on ‘actual exciting machines’, then becoming involved in the design process.

Powerful: Gtech's range has prompted a vigorous response from industry giants Dyson After 12 years, he was running the engineering department, and studying for an Open University degree in his spare time. ‘I think quite early on I knew that one day I’d go out on my own. I did have big ideas that weren’t necessarily wanted. I wanted to go down the cordless route, but they weren’t interested.’He was at Vax, at a lowly level, circa 1993, when James Dyson burst onto the scene. There was a bit of hero worship going on there.  ‘To give him credit, Dyson completely transformed the industry. People like me see him as a father figure.’ It has been said that Dyson made vacuum cleaners sexy. ‘I don’t know about that, but he certainly made them trendy.’Dyson say they have ‘very simply illustrated the difference between our technology and Gtech’s’ and that ‘they are the market leader in cordless vacuum cleaners’.Sadly, the home-spun appeal of Gtech may not last.

Plans are in place for a move to new custom-built premises. 'Possible': Mr Grey has even floated the return of the vacuum bag in the near future for Gtech He likes to cite Gtech as a great British success story, but the reality is that his cleaners are produced in China, as per the industry standard.‘The fact is that you just can’t do it here and be cost-effective. I couldn’t have started a production line in the UK. It would have cost me a quarter of a million pounds. There was no way I had that amount of money.'In China, I did it for £60,000. Obviously the dream would be to bring production over here, but realistically, it can’t happen soon.’So what innovations are we going to see over the next few years in the vacuum cleaning world? The word from James Dyson is that robots are the Next Big Thing.Grey is more, well, grey, about what is to come. Cordless is the future, he believes but he hints that his company is also looking into bringing back the vacuum cleaner bag - the very thing James Dyson famously ditched.