Facebook founder Eduardo Saverin quits US to save tax Mr Saverin, who was born in Brazil and became a US citizen in 1998, is on a list of Americans who decided to ditch their US citizenship in the last 12 months, according to the Internal Revenue Service. The billionaire will still have to pay an exit tax on his stake in Facebook as part of the decision he made in September to renounce his citizenship. Based on Facebook's valuation then and Mr Saverin's 4pc stake, his exit tax bill would have been about $600m. However, experts said that the 30-year old would ultimately have had to pay more tax on his Facebook stake over the course of his life if he had remained a US citizen. US capital gains tax, currently at 15pc, is set to climb to 20pc when cuts first introduced by George W. Bush expire at the end of the year. Mr Saverin lives in Singapore, which does not levy capital gains tax. "He will have decided that what he has had to pay as an exit tax is less than what we would have had to pay if he had stayed," said Reuven Avi-Yonah, a professor of tax at the University of Michigan. The move has generated criticism in the US, where the issue of how much tax the country's wealthiest should pay is climbing up the political agenda ahead of November's presidential election. A spokesman for Mr Saverin said that decision was prompted by US laws that make it harder for American citizens living overseas to invest abroad as well as in the US. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, for example, now requires foreign financial institutions to file reports on accounts of US customers to the IRS, making expat Americans less attractive customers. Mr Saverin met Mark Zuckerberg while they were both studying at Harvard University. The two quarrelled over Mr Saverin's role in the founding of Facebook and his subsequent stake in the site, leading to a legal settlement between the two. Although Mr Saverin's stake does not meet the 5pc threshold that requires it to be disclosed by Facebook, it will be worth almost $4bn should the social networking site sell shares at the upper end of the $28 to $35 range that the company has laid out. Mr Saverin intends to live in Singapore for an "indefinite period of time," according to his spokesman.