The Briton was arrested at the Danish request.
(Photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Dusseldorf Sanjay Shah has made a fortune doing business at the taxpayer’s expense. For a long time, the Briton lived in a villa of more than a thousand square meters on the palm island of Jumeirah in Dubai. He owned his own yacht, and for his 43rd birthday Shah gave his wife a Hermès handbag for 125,000 euros. In the past, he had stars like Prince and Lenny Kravitz flown to Dubai for his foundation.
Now Shah will apparently be flown out himself soon. He had appealed a decision that would see him extradited to Denmark. There, the 52-year-old is considered the biggest tax robber in the history of the country. However, the Court of Cassation in Dubai, which decides whether court decisions should be overturned, has now rejected Shah’s appeal.
Specifically, the Danish public prosecutor’s office accuses Shah of fraudulently stealing more than 1.2 billion euros for tax refunds between 2012 and 2015 with his company Solo Capital, which were not based on any tax payments. His case is part of the Cum-Ex affair, which is now occupying the judiciary in half of Europe.
The Cum-Ex raid hit the Danish state particularly hard given the small state budget. In addition, Shah was able to sneak tax refunds through Cum-Ex there, when other countries had already banned this.
Danish prosecutors accuse Shah of a total of 3,000 individual crimes. A means to an end was a network of more than 200 alleged pension funds in the United States and Malaysia, which had an alleged right to a refund of capital gains taxes. In fact, no taxes were paid and the pension funds were just shell companies.
In early 2021, the Danish judiciary indicted Shah. “This is a case of an extremely serious and extraordinarily extensive crime against the Danish state,” said Prosecutor Per Fiig. The prosecutors therefore did not demand the usual eight years in prison, but twelve. Shah was arrested in Dubai at the end of May 2022 and has been in extradition custody ever since.
Cum-Ex: Charges against Sanjay Shah also in Germany
In Germany, too, prosecutors are after Sanjay Shah. The Hamburg public prosecutor has accused him of money laundering. The banker is said to have laundered part of the loot from Denmark in Hamburg at the Varengold Bank, in which he himself held shares.
In Cologne, the public prosecutor’s office is investigating Shah on suspicion of tax evasion. This is also about cum-ex deals and the refund of taxes that were not paid at all.
Shah denies any guilt. He accuses the aggrieved states of what he calls “system errors”. It is true that men like him had been digging into the tax coffers for years. But one shouldn’t hold him and those like him responsible for this, but rather those who would have allowed this to happen.
“We didn’t do anything illegal, we just took advantage of market opportunities,” Shah once told the Danish financial newspaper. German lawyers also told him that many people made a lot of money with these deals. “It was like they drive trucks into a warehouse and stock them with cash 24 hours a day,” Shah said. Everyone believed the law allowed it.
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In Germany, this view has been proven wrong. The Federal Fiscal Court, the Federal Court of Justice and the Federal Constitutional Court have condemned cum-ex transactions as illegal and punishable. All of the criminal proceedings that have taken place so far have ended in convictions. 130 procedures are still ongoing.
Shah’s lawyers are now having the Court of Cassation’s verdict reviewed. They want to apply to the Dubai Ministry of Justice to ban the extradition until then.
Insiders nevertheless expect Shah’s extradition to Denmark in mid-May. His daily life could improve as a result. According to Shah’s lawyers, prison conditions in Dubai are so bad that they violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
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