Sanjay Shah
Sanjay Shah is a Dubai-based British businessman. He has founded Solo Capital, a hedge fund firm which closed in 2016, and Autism Rocks, a charitable organization that raises awareness for autism.
Shah is a prime suspect in a case regarding the Danish Government being allegedly defrauded of 12.7 billion DKK for between 2012 and 2015, part of the CumEx-Files involving multiple European nations and involves a number of the world's largest banks such as Barclays, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas, Banco Santander, Macquarie Bank and Deutsche Bank. Shah has admitted his company legally enabled clients to legitimately reclaim around DKK 8 billion from the Ministry of Taxation. He claimed innocence, as the trade was legal and claimed that he was only using legal tax loopholes, where dividend income is taxed differently in various jurisdictions.
Early life and education
Shah was born in 1970 in Marylebone, London. He attended King's College London for a degree in medicine, which he dropped in between. Shah later qualified as a chartered accountant.Career
Shah worked as a banker for Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Rabobank "over a period of almost 20 years and – after finding himself unemployed in 2008 – set up his own investment management, brokerage and principal trading business". He founded the hedge fund firm Solo Capital in London, which emplolyed "more than 100 financial experts across offices in London and Dubai". Shah was investigated in regards to tax fraud and Solo Capital closed in 2016, amid the investigation by Danish authorities, while his London home and offices were raided by the British National Crime Agency, and Varengold Bank was raided by German authorities.Danish dividend tax fraud allegations
In 2010, in an audit report, the Ministry of Taxation was found to have ignored warnings on multiple occasions of a legal tax loophole concerning dividend tax. This was two years before Sanjay Shah's company Solo Capital enabled clients to be paid more than 8 billions of DKK in tax refunds. In June 2018, the Ministry of Taxation filed a civil claim in the UK High Court of Justice, claiming it had been the victim of fraud, conspiracy, dishonesty and unjust enrichment.Since 2015, Shah has been the prime suspect in a case regarding the Danish Government being allegedly defrauded of 12.7 billion DKK which was exposed in the CumEx-Files. Shah was investigated in regards to the case in 2015. The alleged tax fraud took place between 2012 and 2015 and is the largest in the history of Denmark. Shah is also the prime suspect in similar alleged tax fraud cases involving more than 200 million euros and 65,000 euros in Belgium and Norway respectively. An additional 300 million euros in Belgium and 40 million euros in Norway were only stopped, because of warnings from the Danish authorities. In addition, he is being investigated since 2016 by Germany and the UK via Eurojust, and by the US Treasury Department, as it is suspected that some of the money were funneled through US pension funds.
As of December 2016, about 300 million euros had been seized by the Danish police in cooperation with foreign police forces.
In 2017 two suspected co-conspirators were also charged by the Danish authorities.
In September, 2018, a High Court of Justice judge in London entered a $1.3 billion default judgment against two UK companies, Solo Capital Limited and Elysium Global Limited, which were no longer in Shah's control, at the behest of the Danish tax agencySKAT. The claims against these companies were not defended hence the default judgment. In the same month, finans.dk, a subsidiary of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, reported that assets in Elysium Global and Elysium Properties, two of Shah's companies, had been frozen. and that Danish authorities have filed cases against him in the Dubai International Financial Centre Courts as well as the Commercial Court in London.
In 2018, Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates had frozen, but not confiscated $660 million in assets belonging to Shah.
In May 2019, a number of American pension funds agreed to return 1.6 billion DKK in a related tax-fraud case. In September 2019, German North Channel Bank accepted a fine of 110 million DKK for its involvement in a related tax fraud scheme. Shah remains the main suspect in the main tax fraud case.
In September 2019, Danish tax authorities reported that a ruling in Dubai against a 'central player' in the tax fraud case provides access to 9 million documents, of which 3.5 million had already been transferred. Shah's spokesman, Jack Irvine, has confirmed that these documents came from Shah. As of September 2019, the total number of Danish indictments against persons and companies involved in the tax fraud scheme has risen to 476 with projected legal costs of 2.4 billion Danish kroner. In May 2020, the Tax Minister Morten Bodskov announced that the fees paid to lawyers was USD350 million, and that 250 new employees had been added to the Tax Office to address massive failures in control.
In September 2019, the authorities have so far found no evidence of fraud in the UK, Germany or Denmark.
In November 2019, British and Danish authorities reached an agreement that the main prosecution against Shah should take place in a Danish court of law, and both countries support his extradition from Dubai to Denmark.
Extradition of a suspect from the United Arab Emirates has been described by a Danish expert as 'almost impossible' due to reciprocity as UAE implements death sentence for certain crimes and Denmark can't do this due to human rights concerns.
As of 2019, Shah has denied any wrongdoing. In papers lodged in London’s High Court as part of a civil case brought by the Danish tax authority SKAT, Shah’s lawyers rejected the allegations against him. A 204-page defence statement said: “Solo Capital Partners, Mr Shah’s firm, provided clearing services for clients to engage in lawful and legitimate trading strategies that were conducted at all times in accordance with Danish law: doing so was neither dishonest nor unlawful.
“This case has caused significant embarrassment to Skat and to the Danish government generally, particularly because dividend arbitrage trading is a widely known and wholly legitimate trading strategy.
“Other European governments have taken steps to limit such trading activity. Skat is attempting retrospectively to amend Danish fiscal law and to cover up or remedy Skat’s earlier failure to limit such trading activity and thereby attack the defendants, who have done nothing dishonest nor illegitimate.”
The Danish Prosecutor interrogated Shah in Abu Dhabi over three days in a voluntary interview in September 2019. As of February 2020, it was reported that Denmark had not brought any criminal charges against Shah.