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

I found Mr Smith to be generally straightforward, candid, direct and fair. His evidence was mostly credible, in my view. He was unnecessarily defensive in places, and my assessment was that he has allowed the pressure of SKAT’s offensive against him to get to him so that at times he too sought to defend the indefensible. That was disappointing, and not to his credit, but understandable. It was not such as to cause me to have general concerns about Mr Smith’s trustworthiness as a witness, or to conclude that his overall testimony was not essentially honest.

The one potentially significant untruth Mr Smith allowed himself to put forward was that in his witness statement, adopted as his evidence in chief, he pretended that his fees as a stock lender in the Solo Model trading were not simply fixed percentages of the relevant dividends (as in fact and to his knowledge they were) and thus, indirectly, a share of the proceeds of tax refund claims if successful.