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

SKAT invited me to find that Mr Dhorajiwala was an evasive and non-responsive witness, who engaged in time-wasting, speculation and speech-making, and who had come to court “to portray a false narrative that he played only a limited role … and that as such, he was not responsible for tax reclaims that were made”. I consider that submission to have been by some distance wide of the mark, and that in the case of Mr Dhorajiwala, SKAT largely proceeded upon an assumption that since he, Mr Horn and Rajen Shah were to a significant extent a team within Solo during the life of the Solo Model in 2012 and the first half of 2013, and then outside Solo working together for the Maple Point Model trading in 2014, his knowledge, understanding and thinking on points that are now said to matter can be taken to have been the same as or similar to that of Mr Horn and Rajen Shah. I do not think that assumption was justified, and I was satisfied that the account given by Mr Dhorajiwala as to his role and the extent to which, therefore, he did or did not have responsibility for or knowledge of the matters on which he was pressed at trial was not a false narrative put forward to deflect, as SKAT would have it, but a truthful account of the reality, so far as he now believes he can remember it.