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

This litigation (and related litigation in other jurisdictions, in particular the US, Malaysia and Dubai) concerned Danish dividend tax refund claims presented to SKAT and paid between August 2012 and July 2015. In the proceedings in this court, SKAT said that it was wrongfully induced to pay those claims by misrepresentations made by the documents submitted to it, interpreting those documents sensibly in their context, namely that of making claims for relief and a refund in respect of Danish dividend tax.

As I mentioned at the outset (paragraph 1 above), this judgment concerns 4,170 tax refund claims accepted and paid by SKAT, for a total of just under DKK12.1 billion. Another DKK400 million odd was paid on tax refund claims arising from structured transactions involving MCML Ltd (previously ED&F Man Capital Markets Ltd). Claims against MCML in these proceedings failed, and a subsequent attempt by SKAT to pursue differently formulated claims against MCML was struck out earlier this year (Skatteforvaltningen v MCML Ltd [2025] EWCA Civ 371, a decision from which the Supreme Court has granted permission to appeal, with the appeal listed to be argued in Feburary 2026).

Each of those tax refund claims followed a series of what purported to be share trades and derivatives relating to shares in one of the leading Danish companies making up the OMX Copenhagen 20 (‘C20’) Index. SKAT’s primary case on the facts was that those apparent transactions were not contracts at all, in that, so SKAT alleged, the respective parties to them intended only to create a documented pretence of share trading. That is not a necessary ingredient of any of the causes of action SKAT has pursued, and this judgment would be clumsy to read if it constantly qualified the transactions or their effects by ‘purported’, ‘purportedly’ or the like, so it does not do so.

I introduce the trial defendants and the claims SKAT made against them below, after first outlining the main stages of the litigation that brought it to the ‘Main Trial’ upon which this is now the judgment.