In a bold display of opulence, self-proclaimed ‘property expert’ Samuel Leeds took to social media, posing aboard a lavish £150,000 private jet. As many Britons were rushing to leave Dubai amidst drone-related concerns, Leeds shared a rather dismissive message: “I don’t know why everyone is not doing this.”

Critics were quick to label his comment as “embarrassingly crude,” a sentiment that seems to follow the 34-year-old. Leeds has built a reputation for encouraging people to invest up to nearly £12,000 in his property courses, promising aspirants the elusive prospect of “financial freedom.” He often touts his supposed “£20 million fortune,” a life of luxury attended by butlers, and an impressive portfolio that includes a castle, as evidence of his success.

Despite facing accusations of pressuring vulnerable individuals into these allegedly misleading courses, Leeds continues to attract a loyal following. Detractors have even likened his sessions to a “cult,” claiming they leave participants significantly out of pocket. Nevertheless, Leeds’s ventures appear to be flourishing.

His financial gains have been substantial enough for him to recently announce a move to a luxurious residence in the United Arab Emirates. This relocation, he claims, is a strategic decision to shield his significant wealth from hefty tax obligations imposed by HMRC.

His devoted fans have continued to flock to them despite repeated accusations that he pressures often vulnerable people to sign up to the ‘misleading’ sessions that it’s been claimed operate like a ‘cult’ and have left students thousands of pounds out of pocket.

In fact, they’ve helped Leeds make so much cash that he recently announced he was relocating to a new luxury home in the United Arab Emirates to protect his extraordinary riches from excessive HMRC bills.

But after his sudden departure from his Middle Eastern tax-haven earlier this month he flew straight into a new storm back in the UK – ironically over his tips to his combined 1.7million social media followers on how to avoid tax while building a property empire.

Less than a week after his Gulfstream jet landed at Heathrow, Leeds was denounced in Parliament as a ‘charlatan’ and ‘con artist’ for peddling bogus tax dodges.

And just a few days later – despite his claim on arrival in London that he was planning an ‘aggressive’ expansion of his UK property empire – he was forced to sell the castle he had repeatedly bragged about as a symbol of his extraordinary success for a whopping £3.5million loss.

Leeds insisted this could be written off as a tax loss – a claim experts also hotly dispute.

Now campaigners are warning that hard-working people who follow his ‘advice’ in good faith risk ruinous tax bills or worse from HMRC in a ‘con’ they fear could become the next payday loan scandal.

For his part, Leeds has repeatedly denied allegations of wrongdoing and has often gone to extreme lengths to try to silence his critics – including legal threats to ‘bully’ the sister of a soldier who killed himself after spending £13,000 on one of his training programmes.

This from a man who repeatedly tells his followers he is a devout Christian who makes money ‘ethically’ and claims he once considered giving it up to become a ‘Mother Teresa figure’.

Two weeks ago, Leeds announced he had put down a £225,000 cash offer to buy a derelict church to stop it being sold off to developers.

He said he was ‘sick and tired’ of seeing thriving churches that were built to ‘glorify Jesus’ being turned into something to make profit.

He said he would offer Darlaston Methodist Church near Walsall in the West Midlands ‘free of charge’ to any church that would use it to ‘worship Jesus’ and ‘feed the hungry, clothe the naked and house the homeless’.

Leeds makes much of his rags-to-riches story and how property deals helped him escape from his ‘working-class’ upbringing on a ‘rough council estate’ in Walsall.

Like so many things involving Leeds, however, his backstory often seems, at best, muddled.

His family may not have been rich, but he attended a private Christian school, which today charges £6,804 per year and, after his parents divorced when he was seven, he lived with his hairdresser mother and accountant stepfather.

Leeds left school at 16 and worked as a magician and a plasterer. In one interview he said he got the idea of going into property after speaking to a builder while on a job.

In another YouTube video outlining his life story, Leeds said the idea came from his stepfather, who had paid off the mortgage of a home he owned and had refinanced it to invest in several other properties.

Inspired by the idea of doing ‘Monopoly in real life’, at the age of just 17 Leeds bought his first property for £100,000 in his stepfather’s name as he was too young to get a mortgage.

He describes using a complicated financing system meaning he didn’t have to put any cash down to make the purchase.

Aged 19, he says, he had six more houses and by 21 he was a property millionaire and financially free.

Footage uploaded to the internet in 2014, when he was 23, suggests that despite not needing to work he was still being touted for gigs as a magician, with an entertainment company announcing him as a ‘new act’.

And despite his love of showing off his lavish lifestyle online, Leeds is adamant that his money-making schemes are underpinned by a higher purpose.

After a teenage trip to Spain with his church, he decided to ‘give his life to Jesus’, he says.

And in his early twenties he took time out from his apparently booming property career to spend three days a week studying at a Bible college and volunteering to help the elderly and the needy in Africa.

It was at this point he considered abandoning it all to devote his life to good works and follow in the footsteps of Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

But then, he claims, he had an epiphany.

‘I realised that as long as when you make money, you make it ethically and you hold it with open hands and a generous heart, then actually making money is helping people,’ he said.

According to Leeds, in response to popular demand, he soon started organising sessions to generously teach others how to follow in his footsteps.

He said he initially charged £250 per person which just about covered the expense of running the one-day crash courses.

But after students pleaded with him for more advanced mentoring he said he finally agreed after realising he was doing them a disservice by refusing.

The courses have made him massive amounts of money.

His firm Samuel Leeds Limited, which is registered as an education company, is now worth more than £6million – around three times more than what appears to be his main UK company listed as a dealing in property sales and rentals.

Those who have attended describe how his entry course – which he reduced to just £1 – as non-stop 14-hour days, filled with upbeat music and high-tempo lectures and seminars.

Towards the end of the course Leeds urges the audience to sign up to a second ‘Deal-Finding Extravaganza’ programme currently advertised at £995, but which previously cost up to £2,300.

And at end of the second course students are enthusiastically encouraged to enrol for year-long mentorship programmes at his Academy, costing almost £12,000.

In 2020 an undercover reporter for BBC posing as a housewife with no income was urged by two of Leeds’ team to pay the full course fee – then £10,000 plus VAT – upfront, despite her expressing concerns about affordability and saying she would need to increase her credit card limit to fund it.

Leeds says he has helped numerous students achieve financial freedom – but there have also been many complaints of participants claiming they were ‘misled’ and lost all their money with nothing to show for it.

The most tragic case is of army reservist Danny Butcher, who killed himself after paying £13,000 for training with Samuel Leeds in 2019.

His family described how the 37-year-old father of one from Doncaster, who had spoken about his mental health in the past, took on loans and credit-card debt to pay for the course because he ‘thought this was his chance’.

‘He felt that he’d let everyone down, that he’d messed everything up and that there was no way out of it,’ his widow explained after his death.

Danny attended the first course with his brother-in-law Glyn Jones, who said he felt people on the crash course were ‘pressurised’ into signing up for further training which felt like ‘brainwashing in a small scale ‘religious cult’.

But the family said nothing that he was promised materialised and Danny lost his money, meaning he couldn’t even get a mortgage for his own family, let alone start to build a property empire.

Danny’s sister, Carrie Jones, attempted to contact Leeds after her brother’s death but after failing to receive a satisfactory response spoke to some journalists and an MP.

She felt that there was a serious public-interest concern about Leeds’s business and the lack of regulation by any professional or governmental body.

Leeds’s response to her was highlighted in a 2024 Parliamentary debate about so called ‘SLAPPS’ – Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation – which are filed by wealthy individuals or corporations to silence critics, journalists or activists.

Calling on the Government to ‘stop the bullies who use SLAPPs to intimidate people so horrifically’, Liberal Democrat MP Rachel Gilmour told the debate how Carrie had received a solicitor’s letter from a firm representing Leeds in ‘numerous legal disputes with his critics’ which accused her of ‘participating in a campaign of harassment’ against him.

It threatened her with legal action if she suggested his course had had ‘any influence on her brother’s suicide’, she told Parliament.

The Commons was told this was a frequent tactic used by Leeds to try to silence critics who felt the course was a ‘scam’.

Other cases in the public domain include a £6million defamation claim against a small Facebook group of Leeds’s former course attendees complaining about his practices.

Leeds told the Mail – as he has always maintained – that Danny’s death was ‘deeply tragic’ but denied it was caused by his course.

Speaking to the Mail, Carrie fiercely disputed this and accused Leeds of ‘disgusting’ behaviour.

‘If he’d have come to us after Danny’s death and apologised and said he had made mistakes and was going to change things we could understand.

‘But instead he is carrying on doing exactly the same thing. We have since heard from so many more people who were conned the same way Danny was.

‘He’s shown no remorse whatsoever. The only contact we’ve had from any of his family is from his Mum, who texted my Mum asking us to stop speaking out. It was pathetic.

‘It feels to me like he’s been let loose to do what he wants when he wants and it doesn’t matter who he destroys. It also seems to me he’s not bothered as long as he gets his money.’

She was appalled by his legal threats. ‘He’s allowed to say what he wants, no matter what the consequences, but because I was speaking out about what he was doing he basically told me to shut my mouth.

‘Well, he’s gone after the wrong woman. I’m not going to stop speaking out about this until I get justice for Danny and stop anyone else from being put at risk.’

Leeds told the Mail he rejected her ‘characterisation of my actions’.

For all the criticism, he has continued to thrive. In November 2021, with his wife Amanda, he bought a £3million six-bedroomed detached home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. The house is currently on the market for £3.5million.

A year later he boasted online that he had rented a second mansion in the town worth £4million.

As they filmed themselves in the vast master bedroom for YouTube, Leeds told his followers it was ‘hard’ for them to book holidays because so few vacation villas had rooms as big as theirs and couldn’t match the team of butlers, cleaners and nannies he had at home.

He now also has a ‘beautiful property’ in Palm Beach, Dubai, which he appears to have returned to despite the ongoing threat. He leaves behind an almighty row in the UK.

Leeds, who has previously claimed to know more than ‘accountants know about tax’ and that some HMRC levies were ‘designed for the stupid’, frequently outlines his tricks to avoid them.

But during a debate about an amendment to the Finance Bill to crack down on ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes, Labour MP Stella Creasy gave a damning indictment of the ‘damage’ Leeds was doing.

Using evidence compiled from genuine tax expert Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates, she outlined the fake dodges, some of which he claims to have done himself on ‘multiple’ occasions and which had been shared millions of times.

She said: ‘He claims that he knows not only a lot about the tax, but a lot about the law, which is like me saying that I know a lot about flying a plane because I have been in one occasionally.’

She cited a claim that you can pay no capital gains tax on a rundown property with the plan to do it up and sell it at a profit, you pay no capital gains tax as long as you claim it’s your main residence.

Another of his ‘wheezes’ is that people should put their spouse and children, even those as young as 13, on their company payroll for £12,500 each and extract the cash from the company tax-free.

In fact, if they are not doing genuine work, it is not a deductible expense. Paying a child under 14 may also be illegal, the MP said.

He also makes ‘flat-out wrong’ claims people can put their property in a trust and protect it from inheritance tax entirely or gift their home to their children, stay living in it and pay zero inheritance tax, the MP said.

Ms Creasy added: ‘We do not just need to call out charlatans such as Samuel Leeds or warn our constituents about the danger of taking advice online. We need to act collectively to stop this before it gets any worse…

‘What I am really asking, on behalf of the millions of people who have been ripped off, is when will Samuel Leeds get a knock on the door from the taxman?’

HMRC does not comment on individuals, but a spokesman told us: ‘Anyone wanting information on rules around taxation should go to Gov.UK or seek advice from a tax professional.’

A few days after his Parliamentary monstering Leeds announced he was selling the Grade II-listed castle, Ribbesford House at Bewdley in Worcestershire, that he bought with his brother in 2018 for £810,000.

He spent around £3million restoring it and five years ago had described on YouTube how it had a ‘gross development value’ of £6.35million.

Now, he conceded, he was selling it for just £450,000 – but insisted the £3.5million he lost on it ‘can be set-off against profits’ with HMRC.

Not so, according to Dan Neidle, who says under tax law the £3.5million loss is only useful if Leeds makes a £3.5million capital gain now or in the future.

Responding to the multiple criticisms, Leeds told the Daily Mail: ‘I do not accept that I have made false claims, misled customers or promoted unlawful tax behaviour.

‘My content is educational and general in nature and individuals should seek independent professional advice before taking action.’

But Ms Creasy told the Mail she fears the worst if action is not taken to halt Leeds’s ‘disinformation’, likening it to the payday loan scandal which left hundreds of thousands of people out of pocket due to missold loans and unaffordable lending practices.

The MP said: ‘I’d urge HMRC to target Samuel Leeds and those like him rather than his followers who follow his advice in good faith and risk being dragged into debt and hit with potentially ruinous tax bills.’

investigations@dailymail.co.uk