Theo LeggettBusiness Correspondent
Jas Bains
Jas Bains alerted Danish authorities to a £1bn tax scam and they hit him with a lawsuit
“We’d be met at airports in 20-foot limousines, and taken to places like the Atlantis hotel in Dubai or the Singapore Grand Prix. There’d be a hundred grand spent in the bar.”
In 2013, Jas Bains was an ambitious young lawyer, enjoying the high life that came with working for an extremely profitable City hedge fund.
Today, he is jobless and has lost most of his wealth, having spent years fighting legal battles and attempting to clear his name of association with a huge tax scam.
The irony, he says, is that he blew the whistle on the scam in the first place – only to find himself one of the targets of a £1.4bn lawsuit.
He is reflecting one month after the case ended, bringing to a close eight years of legal arguments and one of the highest value civil cases ever heard in the UK.
The Danish tax authority was left licking its wounds, after failing to establish that a large group of defendants, including Mr Bains, were liable for huge losses it had suffered.
It all began in 2009, when a banker named Sanjay Shah established a London-based hedge fund called Solo Capital. It also had offices in Dubai. It was one of a network of funds, banks and legal outfits that were to become heavily implicated in the so-called cum-ex trade.
This focused on transactions where shares were sold from one investor to another immediately before the payment of a dividend (cum, or with, dividend) but delivered afterwards (ex-dividend).
Those involved exploited delays in processing the sale to create confusion over who actually owned the shares at the moment when the dividend was paid. This tactic allowed both parties to claim rebates on withholding tax – a levy which had only been paid once, when the dividend was issued.
From the outside, it was complicated, but for those involved it led to ever bigger and more elaborate trades which ultimately cost taxpayers across Europe billions.
It initially became popular in Germany, before spreading to other countries including France, Belgium, Italy and Austria. Solo Capital targeted Denmark, with the bulk of its cum-ex trades taking place from 2013 onw
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