But when the Danish tax authority, Skatteforvaltningen (Skat), launched its huge case, seeking to recover its lost money, Mr Bains was one of the more than 100 individual and corporate defendants initially targeted – alongside Mr Shah.<\/p>\n
With that lawsuit hanging over him it became out of the question for him to work as a lawyer, or to get a role in the City of London. <\/p>\n
“It’s impossible to get a job if you’re being sued as part of a two billion dollar international tax fraud case,” he says.<\/p>\n
However, in October, High court judge Mr Justice Andrew Baker threw out Skat’s claims.<\/p>\n
Acknowledging that “greed can be a powerful motive, and I consider there was substantial greed here”, he nevertheless concluded that Skat has failed to prove it was a victim of deception.<\/p>\n
The authority’s “controls for assessing and paying dividend tax refund claims were so flimsy as to be non-existent,” he said.<\/p>\n
That seemed to echo a statement previously made by Mr Shah in a 2021 German TV interview, which was also cited in the ruling:<\/p>\n
“Why would they pay out for years and years and then, after four years of payments they say, ‘Oh, we made a mistake, or we were cheated'”, he said.<\/p>\n
“If there’s a big sign on the street saying ‘please help yourself’, then me or somebody else would go and help themselves.”<\/p>\n
There may still be an appeal. But for Mr Bains, the ruling provided some much-needed closure \u2013 and, he says, a chance to move on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But when the Danish tax authority, Skatteforvaltningen (Skat), launched its huge case, seeking to recover its lost money,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-239478","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}