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

The difficulty for those defendants, though, is that by the First HS Advice and Ms Becker-Christensen’s emails in finalising it, it was apparent that in Hannes Snellman’s view it was essential for Danish tax law that the Solo Model equity buyer did acquire full legal and beneficial title to a real shareholding, and that if Hannes Snellman had been told of the Solo Model secret ingredient, they would have advised that the equity buyer would not be considered by Danish tax law as ever having been a shareholder or entitled to any dividend. I therefore conclude that, had Mr Shah thought that the tax ownership representation or the dividend entitlement representation was being made to SKAT, he would have believed at the time that SKAT was being told an untruth.

Save for their potential to bear upon my assessment of Mr Shah’s general credibility, the extensive efforts made or led by Mr Shah to conceal the reality of the Solo Model as a centrally directed, share-less trading model, and his involvement in what I have described as collateral dishonesty, either as part of that obfuscation or elsewhere (e.g. in his clandestine acquisition of control of Varengold Bank and Dero Bank), were relied on by SKAT, as to substance, only as supposed further factors supporting a finding that he knew of the falsity of the core representations. I was not persuaded that they provided support to SKAT on that point.