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

Secondly, Mr Baker sought to defend the indefensible rather than admit what was in fact obvious dishonesty in one of his contemporaneous actions. In early November 2015, he was asked to help one of the Maple Point Model buyers respond to a demand from SKAT (which had by then stopped paying claims), in relation to a dividend tax refund claim by the buyer referencing shares in TDC, for evidence of the buyer’s “ownership of the shares on the date, where the amount of the dividend was decided by [TDC]”. The evidence demanded was: “original purchase receipts”; bank statements proving payment of the purchase price; a “Statement of holdings that show, you own the shares on [that] date”; and a copy of any shareholder loan agreement relating to the shareholding. SKAT was plainly interrogating the refund claim in question to see when and how, if at all, the buyer had acquired a shareholding in TDC. But of course, the buyer had never acquired any such shareholding, as Mr Baker knew. Instead of saying that he could not help, given that there had been no shares, Mr Baker created a bespoke document to be provided to SKAT entitled “Proof of Purchase Custodian Statement” and designed falsely to suggest that by the settlement on 12 August 2015 of a trade executed on 7 August 2015, the buyer had acquired 4,630,000 TDC shares.