CL-2018-000297, CL-2018-000404, CL-2018-000590, - [2025] EWHC 2364 (Comm)

The claimant is named in the proceedings as “Skatteforvaltningen (the Danish Customs and Tax Administration)”. It is not a separate legal person from the Kingdom of Denmark. Rather, it is an integral part of the Danish state, being that part of the state with responsibility for the areas of administrative activity that have been allocated to it. In other words, and as a matter of identity or substance, the claimant is the Kingdom of Denmark, acting by and suing in the name of Skatteforvaltningen, a ministerial authority going by that name since 1 July 2018, previously (from 2005) having been named “SKAT”.

The nation state of Denmark is a constitutional monarchy. Professor, Dr.Jur Frederik Waage gave unchallenged expert evidence on that, confirming and explaining the view given in his treatise, “Offentligretlige retssager” (2020), at pp.188-189, that (in translation): “The entire state administration is perceived in case law as one unit. This is consistent with the fact that [the monarch] is understood in The Constitutional Act as a collective term for all the ministries under the executive power … . The fact that the state is a single entity has, among other things, the consequence that different state authorities can set off a claim against a citizen across authority boundaries … . Although the State is perceived as an entity, it is the specific administrative authority responsible for the subject matter that acts as plaintiff or defendant on behalf of the State … .”

Prof. Waage explained aspects of the independence of action, and knowledge, of different ministerial authorities as a matter of Danish public law that inform, for example, his observation that such an authority can and will act, in a Danish court, as plaintiff or defendant on behalf of the Danish state. I do not consider that sense in which, as Prof. Waage put it, a ministerial authority “thus possesses an independent status and legal personality”, falsifies the fundamental “single entity” principle stated in his text and confirmed by his report. That principle, however, would not mean that any of the claims pursued in this litigation fell to be dismissed because the claimant was named in the proceedings as it was rather than as the Kingdom of Denmark; and I continue to refer to the claimant, as I have done throughout the litigation, simply as ‘SKAT’.