I blew the whistle on a massive tax fraud

“We’d be met at airports in 20-foot limousines, and taken to places like the Atlantis hotel in Dubai or the Singapore Grand Prix. There’d be a hundred grand spent in the bar.”

In 2013, Jas Bains was an ambitious young lawyer, enjoying the high life that came with working for an extremely profitable City hedge fund.

Today, he is jobless and has lost most of his wealth, having spent years fighting legal battles and attempting to clear his name of association with a huge tax scam.

The irony, he says, is that he blew the whistle on the scam in the first place – only to find himself one of the targets of a £1.4bn lawsuit.

He is reflecting one month after the case ended, bringing to a close eight years of legal arguments and one of the highest value civil cases ever heard in the UK.

The Danish tax authority was left licking its wounds, after failing to establish that a large group of defendants, including Mr Bains, were liable for huge losses it had suffered.

It all began in 2009, when a banker named Sanjay Shah established a London-based hedge fund called Solo Capital. It also had offices in Dubai. It was one of a network of funds, banks and legal outfits that were to become heavily implicated in the so-called cum-ex trade.

This focused on transactions where shares were sold from one investor to another immediately before the payment of a dividend (cum, or with, dividend) but delivered afterwards (ex-dividend).

Those involved exploited delays in processing the sale to create confusion over who actually owned the shares at the moment when the dividend was paid. This tactic allowed both parties to claim rebates on withholding tax – a levy which had only been paid once, when the dividend was issued.

From the outside, it was complicated, but for those involved it led to ever bigger and more elaborate trades which ultimately cost taxpayers across Europe billions.

It initially became popular in Germany, before spreading to other countries including France, Belgium, Italy and Austria. Solo Capital targeted Denmark, with the bulk of its cum-ex trades taking place from 2013 onwards.

Jas Bains joined the company in 2010, as its head lawyer, but went on to run the London office. At the time, Solo was “a successful firm, making money in five or six different areas pretty well”.

And making money meant enjoying the high life, with staff going on sprees to places like Las Vegas, Singapore and Dubai.

“What I will say about Sanjay is he knew how to throw a party,” he says.

“One time we were in the Ku De Ta club at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore. He bought 20 bottles of vintage Dom Perignon champagne, and people were just spraying each other with the stuff.

“People have likened it to Wolf of Wall Street and such like.”

It didn’t end there. “Sanjay organised private concerts in Dubai with Prince. A small room with him and his friends at three or four million dollars for an evening … private concerts with Snoop Dogg.”

By mid-2014, however, Mr Bains had fallen out with his boss and left the company for a competitor. At the time, the cum-ex transactions targeting Denmark were dramatically picking up.

“I was hearing from people who’d left Solo that Sanjay was doing some big trades in 2014, but look, I’d moved on, it didn’t have much to do with me,” he says.

“But then I heard, actually Sanjay made close to €100m in trades from Denmark in 2013, closer to €250m in 2014 and he was looking for a billion in 2015.”

Alarm bells were ringing.

“I thought this can’t be right. It’s not that I thought the trades were invalid or criminal in some way. It’s just any country that has a billion Euros syphoned off it will scream bloody murder.”

Solo Capital wasn’t the only company now targeting Denmark. Others were getting in on the act. Jas believed it was only a matter of time before the house of cards came tumbling down.

“I was quite confident I’d done nothing wrong, but I knew if this carried on and blew up in spectacular style, I was going to get pulled in,” he explains.

With that in mind, in 2015, he decided to blow the whistle.

He contacted a Danish lawyer, who in turn put him in touch with the Danish police. He went on to spend two and a half years assisting them with understanding how the cum-ex scam worked.

Danish prosecutors did not target Mr Bains. Their attention was focused firmly on Mr Shah. The 54-year-old was eventually extradited from Dubai to face fraud charges – and in December last year was sentenced to 12 years in jail.

It was the heaviest penalty ever handed out in Denmark for a fraud case. He is currently appealing.

But when the Danish tax authority, Skatteforvaltningen (Skat), launched its huge case, seeking to recover its lost money, Mr Bains was one of the more than 100 individual and corporate defendants initially targeted – alongside Mr Shah.

With that lawsuit hanging over him it became out of the question for him to work as a lawyer, or to get a role in the City of London.

“It’s impossible to get a job if you’re being sued as part of a two billion dollar international tax fraud case,” he says.

However, in October, High court judge Mr Justice Andrew Baker threw out Skat’s claims.

Acknowledging that “greed can be a powerful motive, and I consider there was substantial greed here”, he nevertheless concluded that Skat has failed to prove it was a victim of deception.

The authority’s “controls for assessing and paying dividend tax refund claims were so flimsy as to be non-existent,” he said.

That seemed to echo a statement previously made by Mr Shah in a 2021 German TV interview, which was also cited in the ruling:

“Why would they pay out for years and years and then, after four years of payments they say, ‘Oh, we made a mistake, or we were cheated'”, he said.

“If there’s a big sign on the street saying ‘please help yourself’, then me or somebody else would go and help themselves.”

There may still be an appeal. But for Mr Bains, the ruling provided some much-needed closure – and, he says, a chance to move on.