Low-tax Texas opens London office to lure jobs and investment

The US state of Texas is putting UK businesses in its crosshairs with the launch this month of a dedicated London office to lure jobs and investment to the low-tax Lone Star State.Texas recently secured approval for the new site, adding to a growing list of international offices from which it can try to draw corporate heavyweights across its borders.It is the latest sign that Texas lobbyists, led by the office of the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, are widening their economic ambitions beyond American borders, having already had success luring jobs and investment from rival US states including California, Delaware and New York.Lobbyists working in the London office are likely to court UK bosses with incentives including new, fast-track business courts and multimillion dollar subsidies. Texas charges neither corporation nor income tax.Their targets are expected to include the City’s banks and investment houses, as the state aims to build on Dallas’s financial-sector boom, and continue its promotion of the area now known as Y’all Street.Those ambitions have caught the attention of the London-corporation" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="1574" data-entity-type="organization">City of London Corporation. The City’s mayor, Susan Langley, travelled to Dallas in February and discussed how London could tap into excitement over the launch later this year of the state’s first dedicated stock market, the TXSE. “With the launch of the Texas Stock Exchange, new dual-listing opportunities could connect British and Texan firms to fresh capital,” she said in a post on X after the visit.The news comes as London tries to reverse a trend where businesses have been abandoning the UK stock market, choosing either to go private or shift their listings to hubs overseas, including New York.The London office – which will add to Texas’s offices in Mexico and Taiwan – will be led by James Taylor, one of the founders of the Austin-based lobbying and public relations firm Vianovo.Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, is backing the new office in London. Photograph: Abbas Shirmohammadi/Panoramic Visions for CNPLinda McMahon, the head of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation, will be part of a delegation of local lobbyists travelling to London this month to mark the launch in mid-April. She told the Guardian that Texas already had a strong record in bringing international businesses into its borders.“I’m working with a company that wants to move manufacturing here from the Netherlands,” she said. “I met with companies that want to move manufacturing from Ukraine, [and] we’ve got an enormous amount of Chinese and Korean influence here.”Strong business lobbying efforts have already helped Texas to overtake California in having the largest number of Fortune 500 company headquarters of any American state. These include the headquarters of Oracle, which moved from Silicon Valley to Austin in 2020, and three of Elon Musk’s ventures – Tesla, X Corp, SpaceX – all of which moved from California in recent years. ExxonMobil is the most recent win, with the oil company announcing last month it would shift its base to Texas from New Jersey.“We’ve got the makeup, we’ve [got] the ingredients to continue to push and grow our international footprint,” Mike Rosa, a senior vice-president of the Dallas Regional Chambers business lobby group, told the Guardian last month. “But I don’t know that Dallas is necessarily branded or known for the level of international activity that we have.”A spokesperson for Abbott’s office said: “Texas has long had a global presence, with offices in Mexico and most recently in Taiwan designed to attract foreign direct investment and job creation into Texas, while also helping Texas companies export worldwide.“These offices operate under the Texas Economic Development and Tourism Office, in the office of Greg Abbott. We look forward to sharing more information on future expansion soon.”