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

SKAT’s Particulars of Claim, with its Schedules 5A to 5AG containing further particulars against individual defendants or groups of defendants, was a difficult, poorly structured, somewhat impenetrable pleading. In SKAT v Goal Taxback [2020] EWHC 1624 (Comm), which dealt with a summary judgment application by Goal and a cross-application by SKAT to amend, I acknowledged the daunting nature of the task of pleading SKAT’s claims in these proceedings, but even allowing for that came to the conclusion, with regret, “that SKAT’s pleading is not fit for purpose, so far as concerns SKAT’s claims against Goal, on which alone I have focused in the detail required to form such a view because of the need to determine this summary judgment application” (ibid, at [58]). In that respect, the pleaded case against Goal was not an outlier, and SKAT’s sprawling, imprecise and badly structured pleading was an ongoing source of difficulty throughout the proceedings. There is room for an argument, with the benefit of hindsight, that it should have been struck out with a direction that SKAT re-plead with a proper structure and focus, in line with Section C.1.1 of the Commercial Court Guide.

In that regard, it has not helped the task of preparing this judgment that SKAT’s written closing submissions did not do what I thought I had said during oral openings at trial I would want them to do, which was to take the case pursued by SKAT in closing against each defendant and, for each analytically distinct cause of action pursued against that defendant, identify the case SKAT said it had pleaded on each necessary ingredient of that cause of action, taking them one at a time, and then make for each such ingredient whatever submissions SKAT wanted to give me in writing as to why, it contended, it had established at trial what, by that pleading, it had set out to establish.

The pleaded case that Mr Shah has a primary liability for deceit, although any representations made to SKAT were made in each instance by a Tax Agent as applicant submitting a tax refund on behalf of a named client, is a case in point. It is a complex mess, difficult to assimilate and hard to understand. As it happens, in my request that the written closing submissions should assist in this regard, I noted by way of example, and in effect, that if there were different routes by which it was alleged that Mr Shah had a primary liability for deceit, and different routes by which it was alleged that he had an accessory liability for someone else’s deceit, then each of those routes gave rise to an analytically distinct cause of action. I identified then, as regards primary liability, that SKAT appeared to be pursuing two routes for liability against Mr Shah: first, that where his signature was on a Solo Model CAN, SKAT would say that was sufficient (a route, in the event, not pursued in closing); second, that SKAT would say he was the true principal of whoever was to be regarded as having made representations to SKAT (that is to say, in fact, as I have decided, the Tax Agents).