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A British hedge fund trader at the center of Europe’s massive “cum-ex” dividend scandal has been sentenced to 12 years in prison by a Danish court for defrauding the Scandinavian country of DKr9 billion ($1.3 billion).
Sanjay Shah, who was extradited from Dubai last year, was the mastermind behind a system that led to the refund of billions of euros in dividend tax that had never been paid, the Danish judges found.
The court also ordered the seizure of DKr7.2 billion from Shah, who said immediately after the conviction on Thursday that he would appeal.
Several European countries, including Denmark, Germany, Italy and France, were among the worst hit by the cum-ex scandal in the 2010s. Prosecutors in Germany are investigating 1,500 people over the scandal, while Denmark claims it was defrauded of almost DKr13 billion in total and has filed charges against nine defendants.
Shah denied any wrongdoing and argued that he had merely exploited loopholes in Danish law to get paid.
The trader and his hedge fund Solo Capital Partners are also facing a UK civil lawsuit brought by the Danish tax authorities to recover £1.4 billion in refunds.
The case was described by a judge in London as “one of the largest and most complex lawsuits” heard in the UK commercial courts, with Skat, the Danish tax authorities, presenting around 250,000 pages of documents.
The 12-year sentence against Shah for fraud is the longest ever imposed in Denmark for an economic crime.
In an interview broadcast shortly after his conviction, Shah told Danish television channel TV2 that he was “a greedy bastard” and that siphoning the money from the Danish treasury was like “playing Space Invaders,” where he wanted to beat previous top player. score.
The court in Glostrup, just outside Copenhagen found he played a “central and controlling role in a crime that was carefully planned and systematically organised,” involving the filing of thousands of dividend refunds.
It added that the three-year duration of the crime, and the facts that Shah had personally enriched himself and that his actions only ended when tax authorities stopped payments in 2015 due to suspicions of fraud, all meant that there “particularly aggravating circumstances”, which led to the imposition of the strictest possible prison sentence.
Preben Bang Henriksen, MP for the ruling Liberal Party and legal spokesman, praised the verdict as showing that “you face a severe punishment if you steal from Denmark.”
Shah had argued that it was impossible for him to get a fair trial in Denmark after a number of members of the government commented on the case, including Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who welcomed the Briton’s extradition as a sign that “you cannot achieve impunity by staying abroad”.