A British hedge fund dealer accused of defrauding Danish tax authorities in a billion-pound rip-off has gone on trial in Copenhagen, with the federal government hoping to get better the cash within the blockbuster case.
Sanjay Shah, who was arrested in June 2022 in Dubai the place he was dwelling, is accused of operating a 9bn krone (£1.03bn) rip-off that enabled firms he managed to fraudulently declare Danish tax refunds between 2012 and 2015.
The 53-year-old pleaded not responsible on Monday and stated he had not violated Danish legislation. Shah may resist 12 years in jail if the Glostrup district courtroom in Copenhagen finds him responsible.
The United Arab Emirates extradited Shah to Denmark in December after prolonged negotiations, having signed an extradition treaty with Denmark in March 2022.
The prosecution claims Shah “used a well-designed and organised fraud scheme to submit greater than 3,000 purposes to unlawfully obtain greater than 9bn krone in dividend tax refunds from the treasury”.
In follow, in line with the prosecution’s case, overseas corporations managed by Shah pretended to personal shares in Danish firms and fraudulently claimed dividend tax refunds.
The prosecution stated it hoped to get better 7.2bn krone illegally acquired by Shah.
Describing the complexity of the case, the prosecutor Marie Tullin advised the courtroom it concerned greater than 300,000 paperwork. “It’s not a secret to anybody that there are a variety of attachments,” she stated.
Danish media have portrayed Shah as a person who flaunted his flashy life-style whereas additionally elevating cash via charity live shows for an organisation he based referred to as Autism Rocks.
Shah’s former assistant Anthony Mark Patterson lately determined to plead responsible to being an confederate. On 1 March the Briton was sentenced to eight years in jail. The courtroom might name him as a witness in Shah’s case.
Throughout his trial, Patterson stated he was “thrown into deep water” as quickly as he was recruited to Solo Capital, the funding fund that Shah based in 2013 and headed.
“By the autumn, once I totally understood the inner work processes, I turned conscious of the buying and selling patterns after we needed to plan the trades for 2014,” Patterson advised the courtroom. He expressed his “remorse at having taken half” within the scheme.
Shah’s lawyer Kåre Pihlmann advised AFP his shopper was involved about getting a good trial in Denmark.
“Denmark has very, excellent judges. Unbiased, skilled. That’s not the issue,” Pihlmann stated. “The issue is that some authorities representatives, particularly cupboard ministers, have through the years made feedback concerning the case giving the impression that he’s responsible of fraud. That may be a attainable violation of the presumption of innocence.”
In January 2021 when the indictment was introduced, the prosecution stated it had managed to grab 3bn krone, or a few third of the full.
“Typically … it is extremely troublesome or virtually unimaginable to get the cash again. And as a rule, all seized belongings have to be shared with the nation which carried out the precise seizure,” Per Fiig, one other prosecutor, stated in a press release on the time.
In Might 2023 a Dubai courtroom ordered Shah to pay Denmark’s tax authority greater than $1.2bn, and one other trial is underneath manner in Britain.
So-called “cum-ex” and “cum-cum” scams, which benefit from a loophole in European tax legal guidelines, have been uncovered in a number of EU international locations. In response to Bloomberg estimates, the scams have value European taxpayers as much as €150bn (£128bn).