On Friday, Dubai police announced that they had arrested and planned to extradite a British man to Denmark, where he was wanted for allegedly masterminding a $1.7 billion tax scheme, one of the country’s largest-ever fraud cases.
Sanjay Shah, a hedge fund trader, was arrested after Danish officials signed an extradition agreement with the UAE in March.
Shah has maintained his innocence in interviews with journalists while living in Dubai on the city-man-made state’s Palm Jumeirah archipelago for the past few years, but he has never appeared in Denmark to answer the allegations.
It’s unclear whether Shah, 52, has a local lawyer in the UAE. In Dubai, the commercial capital of the UAE’s seven-sheikhdom federation, no court date appeared to have been set. On Friday, the first day of the Emirati weekend, prosecutors did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman for Shah, who was once the CEO of Solo Capital Partners, did not respond to a request for comment. The hedge fund manager ran a center for autistic children in Dubai, which closed in 2020 as a result of Denmark’s extradition efforts. He also ran the Autism Rocks charity in the United Kingdom, which put on shows with major artists to raise money.
In a statement, Dubai police Brig. Gen. Jamal Al Jallaf said the emirate received an international arrest warrant from Denmark for Shah. Al Jallaf said Shah was accused of a fraud that saw foreign businesses pretend to own shares in Danish companies and claim tax refunds for which they were not eligible.
“The fraud scheme, known as ‘cum-ex’ trading, involved submitting thousands of applications to the Danish Treasury on behalf of investors and companies from several countries around the world in order to receive dividend tax refunds,” Al Jallaf said. Danish authorities say the scheme ran for some three years beginning in 2012.
In a joint statement, Denmark’s Justice and Foreign Ministries praised Dubai’s arrest of Shah, whom they described as a target of the country’s prosecutors since 2015.
“The Danish Treasury has been created for a staggering amount, and of course, it should not be possible for suspected perpetrators to hide in the Middle East and thus avoid being held accountable in a Danish courtroom,” Justice Minister Mattias Tesfaye said.
“Now I am awaiting the legal process in the United Arab Emirates, and crossing my fingers that it will end up that we can get Sanjay Shah on a plane to Denmark, so he can be prosecuted in this country,” he added.
Shah is one of several suspects in the tax scheme sought by Danish authorities.
