Asylum seekers being moved out of taxpayer-funded hotels are simply being moved to other hotels still paid for by the Home Office, Sky News has learned.
Home Office minister Chris Philip told Sky News the government had already closed 50 hotels to migrants, reducing the number from 398 to 348 – something they had pledged to do by the end of this month with a promise to house them in cheaper types of accommodation like the Bibby Stockholm barge.
But Sky News has seen taxis full of migrants leaving one hotel in Kidderminster, Worcestershire, only to arrive at another hotel 70 miles away in Derbyshire.
One asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who we’re calling Khan, 19, arrived on a small boat in early June 2022. He will now be unable to continue attending college, where he was studying English and GCSE Maths, as his new hotel is too far away.
He states he had no choice but to move. “The hotel tell us that if you cancel this process you must sleep on the road like a homeless [person],” he says.
Image: Migrants being moved from now-closed hotel in Bewdley
Khan came to the UK because his family worked for the Afghan government so he no longer felt safe after the Taliban takeover of the country in 2021.
Due to the length of time he’s been waiting for a decision his asylum claim is part of the “legacy” backlog that Rishi Sunak pledged to “abolish” by the end of 2022.
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The Home Office said the pledge had been “delivered”, having processed more than 112,000 asylum claims overall in 2023.
It means Khan had expected by now to not still be living in taxpayer-funded accommodation.
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“I am also not happy to stay in hotel accommodation because I want to work. I want to start a new life and I cannot do something right now… just sleep and eat,” he says.
He currently has a solicitor chasing the Home Office for a decision on his claim.
“Up to now no-one gave me a response, up to December when I emailed them they told us wait up to the end of the year – now the new year start and when we email them, no-one responds.”
Image: Khan came to the UK because he no longer felt safe after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan
A group of residents who offer support to people seeking asylum has been tracking the movements of these hotel closures over recent months.
Sarah Frost, lead co-ordinator from Wyre Forest Supports Asylum Seekers, told Sky News: “We’ve got four from here who got moved from a hotel that was closing just before Christmas.
“They got moved here, and now they’re moving on to another hotel. So some people have been in five or six hotels in a matter of six months or so.”
She adds: “I suppose [the Home Office is] consolidating hotels but obviously it still costs to feed the person…I can’t see how it’s really saving money because taxi fares from Derbyshire to Worcestershire is going to cost a lot of money.”
Another hotel in Bewdley, Worcestershire, was closed last week, but Sky News has been told the men were sent to three different hotels further north.
Image: Hallo believes the moves are due to the upcoming election
Hallo, not his real name, 31, from Iraq was sent by taxi with eight other men to a hotel in Staffordshire.
“It’s just shifting around, just switching…just wasting money”, he says. “I think it’s just because of the next election so they want to tell the native people we sorted out the hotels, the cases, the backlog cases.”
The closure of hotels has also affected families. Near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, the curtains are shut and children’s scooters have been abandoned outside a hotel that was recently closed to migrants.
Sky News has been told that children have lost school places because they were moved suddenly to another county.
The Home Office told Sky News it is making significant progress to reduce the cost of £8.2m a day to UK taxpayers.
A spokesperson said: “As we exit more hotels in the coming months, we remain upfront about accommodation being on a no-choice basis. This means that individuals may be moved to other parts of the asylum accommodation estate too, including hotels.”
Braden John Karony, the CEO of crypto firm SafeMoon, has cited the US Department of Justice’s directive to no longer pursue some crypto charges in an effort to get the case against him and his firm dismissed.
In an April 9 letter to New York federal court judge Eric Komitee, Karony’s attorney, Nicholas Smith, said the court should consider an April 7 memo from US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that disbanded the DOJ’s crypto unit.
“The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator,” Blanche said in the memo, which added the DOJ “will no longer pursue litigation or enforcement actions that have the effect of superimposing regulatory frameworks on digital assets.”
Blanche also directed prosecutors not to charge violations of securities and commodities laws when the case would require the DOJ to determine if a digital asset is a security or commodity when charges such as wire fraud are available.
An excerpt of the letter Karony sent to Judge Komitee. Source: PACER
In the footnote of the letter, Karony’s counsel wrote an exemption to the DOJ’s new directive would be if the parties have an interest in defending that a crypto asset is a security, but added that “Karony does not have such an interest.”
The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed simultaneous charges of securities violations, wire fraud, and money laundering against Karony and other SafeMoon executives in November 2023.
The government alleged Karony, SafeMoon creator Kyle Nagy and chief technology officer Thomas Smith withdrew assets worth $200 million from the project and misappropriated investor funds.
Another attempt to nix the case
The letter is Karony’s latest attempt to get the case thrown out. In February, he asked that his trial, scheduled to begin on March 31, be delayed as he argued President Donald Trump’s proposed crypto policies could potentially affect the case.
Later in February, Smith changed his plea to guilty and said he took part in the alleged $200 million crypto fraud scheme. Nagy is at large and is believed to be in Russia.
SafeMoon filed for bankruptcy in December 2023, a month after it was hit with twin cases from the SEC and DOJ. It was also hacked in March 2023, with the hacker agreeing to return 80% of the funds.
Ukraine’s financial regulator has proposed taxing certain crypto transactions as personal income at a rate of up to 23% but excluding crypto-to-crypto transactions and stablecoins.
Crypto transactions would be taxed at 18% with a 5% military levy on top as part of the proposed framework, released on April 8 by Ukraine’s National Securities and Stock Market Commission.
NSSMC Chairman Ruslan Magomedov said in an April 8 statement that “the issue of crypto taxes is not a hypothesis, but a reality that is fast approaching.”
He added that the agency created the framework to help lawmakers make an “informed resolution” by considering each suggestion’s advantages and disadvantages because “these aspects can have a critical impact on the market and tax liability.”
Crypto-to-crypto transactions wouldn’t be taxed, bringing Ukraine in line with other European countries, including Austria and France, as well as crypto-friendly jurisdictions like Singapore, the NSSMC said.
The regulator says it “makes sense” to exclude stablecoins backed by foreign currencies or only apply a 5% or 9% tax because Ukraine’s tax code already excludes income from transactions in “foreign exchange values.”
A translated excerpt of the NSSMC’s report said stablecoins backed by foreign currencies could be exempt from taxation. Source: NSSMC
Mining, staking, hard forks and airdrops
Other crypto-related activities, such as mining, staking and airdrops, are also addressed in the framework which floated a few options for taxation.
The NSSMC said crypto mining is generally considered a business activity, but there might be a general tax-free limit for certain crypto transactions, including mining.
Under the framework, staking could be considered as “business captive income” or only taxed if the crypto is cashed out for fiat currencies. While hard forks and airdrops could be taxed either as ordinary income or when the tokens are cashed.
The regulator suggests a tax-free threshold could help “relieve the burden on small investors” and is common in other jurisdictions.
Exemptions for donations, transfers between family members, and holders who keep their crypto for a set amount of time are also flagged as possibilities. However, the NSSMC says the exemption might not apply to non-custodial crypto wallets.
Last December, Daniil Getmantsev, head of the tax committee of Ukraine’s parliament, said a draft bill to legalize cryptocurrencies was under review and expected to be finalized early this year.
Digital asset manager 21Shares has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a spot Dogecoin exchange-traded fund, following similar filings from rivals Bitwise and Grayscale.
The 21Shares Dogecoin ETF would seek to track the price of the memecoin Dogecoin (DOGE), according to the firm’s April 9 Form S-1 registration statement. The Dogecoin Foundation’s corporate arm, House of Doge, plans to assist 21Shares with marketing the fund.
21Shares said Coinbase Custody would be the proposed custodian of its Dogecoin ETF but did not specify a fee, ticker or what stock exchange it would list on.
21Shares must also file a 19b-4 filing with the SEC to kickstart the regulator’s approval process for the fund.
DOGE currently has a $24.2 billion market cap and is the eighth-largest cryptocurrency by value. It was created in 2013 as a joke and is a fork of Lucky Coin, which itself is a fork of Bitcoin.
21Shares’ proposed Dogecoin ETF is the company’s latest effort to expand its spot crypto ETF offerings, which currently includes only a spot Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) fund.
The issuer also filed with the SEC in February to launch a spot Polkadot (DOT) ETF and last year, it filed to create a spot XRP (XRP) ETF.
The recent surge in crypto ETF filings reflects a “spaghetti cannon approach” from issuers testing which products the new SEC leadership might approve, Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart said in February.
“Issuers will try to launch many many different things and see what sticks,” Seyffart said.
Seyffart and fellow Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said in February that there is a 75% chance that the SEC will approve a spot Dogecoin ETF this year, while the betting platform Polymarket currently gives approval odds of 64%.
21Shares and House of Doge partner for DOGE funds in Switzerland
The 21Shares Dogecoin product will trade under the ticker “DOGE” with a 2.5% fee.
21Shares president Duncan Moir said that Dogecoin “has become more than a cryptocurrency: it represents a cultural and financial movement that continues to drive mainstream adoption, and DOGE offers investors a regulated avenue to be part of this exciting project.”