#you go danish pension fund

[galdrien]

Todays Tesla update

One of the biggest pension funds in Denmark has sold its holding of Tesla shares due to Teslas refusal to sign a collective agreement with IF Metall. The fund owns Tesla shares to a value of 400 million danish kronor (57 800 000 US dollars)

[phroyd]

Global investors managing $32tn issued a stark warning to governments at the UN climate summit on Monday, demanding urgent cuts in carbon emissions and the phasing out of all coal burning. Without these, the world faces a financial crash several times worse than the 2008 crisis, they said.

The investors include some of the world’s biggest pension funds, insurers and asset managers and marks the largest such intervention to date. They say fossil fuel subsidies must end and substantial taxes on carbon be introduced.

Ministers arrive at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, on Monday for its crucial second week, when the negotiations on turning the vision of the Paris agreement into reality reach a critical point, with finance for fighting global warming a key area of dispute.

“The long-term nature of the challenge has, in our view, met a zombie-like response by many,” said Chris Newton, of IFM Investors which manages $80bn and is one of the 415 groups that has signed the Global Investor Statement. “This is a recipe for disaster as the impacts of climate change can be sudden, severe and catastrophic.”

Investment firm Schroders said there could be $23tn of global economic losses a year in the long term without rapid action. This permanent economic damage would be almost four times the scale of the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis. Standard and Poor’s rating agency also warned leaders: “Climate change has already started to alter the functioning of our world.”

Thomas DiNapoli, of the $207bn New York State Common Retirement Fund, another signatory, said taking action on global warming not only avoided damage but could boost jobs and growth. “The low-carbon economy presents numerous opportunities and investors who ignore the changing world do so at their own peril.”

Lord Nicholas Stern, of the London School of Economics said: “The low-carbon economy is the growth story of the 21st century and it is inclusive growth. Without that story, we would not have got the 2015 Paris agreement, but the story has grown stronger and stronger and is really compelling now.”

The US Trump administration will hold its only event at the UN summit on Monday and is expected to promote “clean coal”. But Stern said Trump’s suggestion that action on climate change was a jobs killer was “dead wrong”. Stern said: “You don’t create jobs for the 21st century by trying to whistle up jobs from the 19th century.”

A key demand of the Global Investor Statement is to phase out coal-fired power stations across the world. Peter Damgaard Jensen, the CEO of Danish pension fund PKA, said: “Investors, including PKA, are moving out of coal in their droves given its devastating effects on the climate and public health, compounded by its poor financial performance.”

Dozens of nations will affirm their commitment to end their coal burning on Thursday. However, the UN summit has seen US, Chinese and Japanese financial institutions cited as leaders in providing nearly $500bn in backing for new coal plants since the Paris agreement was signed.

Another investor demand on governments is to introduce “economically meaningful” taxes on carbon. Most are below $10 per tonne, but needed to rise to up to $100 in the next decade or two, the investors said. The French president Emmanuel Macron’s botched attempt to increase fuel taxes and the gilets jaunes protests that followed were a model of how not to do it, said observers in Poland.

“It failed to take people along with them, accompanying the policy with social measures to allow citizens to embrace the opportunities of the transition and ride out the challenges,” said Camilla Born, of advisers E3G. The host government of the climate summit, Poland, is heavily reliant on coal and is stressing the need for a “just transition” for workers in the fossil fuel industry.

The investors include some of the globe’s largest pension funds, such as Calsters and ABP, and insurers, including Aviva, AXA and Zurich. They also want an end to subsidies for coal, oil and gas, which the IMF rates at $5tn a year and which the G20 has been promising to tackle for a decade. This measure alone could cut global CO2 emissions by 10% by 2030, according a UN report released in time for the Poland summit.

The investors said current national pledges to cut carbon would lead to a catastrophic 3C of global warming and that plans must be dramatically increased by 2020. For developing countries, ”finance is the critical enabler of increasing ambition,” said Niranjali Amerasinghe, of the World Resources Institute.

UN climate summits are frequently dogged by disputes over the $100bn a year that rich nations have promised to poorer ones by 2020 to tackle climate change. Direct government funding and private company finance were needed, Amerasinghe said: “It is really great when private sector is out there saying we are going to invest in climate-friendly activities.”

Phroyd

[geeksfromfuture-blog]

Can Technology Save Engineers?

What do you think of when you hear the term "Reliability Engineering" in relation to engineering? You might think of a cataclysmic event that cost thousands of lives in World War II, such as the sinking of the USS Maine or the infamous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. What you may not think of is the fact that a lot of destruction and death could have been avoided with the invention of the computer and the Internet. That same technology and that same cost saving could now be used to save thousands of lives every day, worldwide. Now imagine this same technology being applied to the job of an engineer. What would be his or her role? Would they need to do something completely different to determine whether a bridge would collapse? Computer technology has revolutionized communication. Software like Skype can make calls at the same time, a computer engineer is doing the calculations that lead to a bridge collapsing. Of course, that's assuming that all the engineers could carry out all the functions that are critical to the stability of bridges. How does a computer engineer do that? What if you knew that the engineer of a bridge collapse was being asked to take his computer off line? What if you knew that the software needed to run his calculations would not be available for him to use? Would you still want that engineer to perform that task? Would it still be right for him to be responsible for that bridge? Well, the answer is yes, of course. The engineering job that is to be performed by that engineer would still require that the engineer to meet and exceed a certain standard. But would the engineer still need to make a certain level of output? You see, the engineering job of figuring out whether a bridge would collapse would need to account for many more variables than just one. This is just one of the reasons why it would be wrong to suggest that only a bridge collapse could save lives. What about the thousands of engineers who are making use of supercomputers in order to perform their jobs at their most reliable level? Are they all being asked to sacrifice the efficiency of their work? If you think about it, this is a good example of how technology can affect your life in a positive way. That is because technology can help you save thousands of lives every single day, worldwide. No, I am not kidding. If you use your computer to do something else while your engineer is trying to calculate a bridge collapse, then you are doing something wrong. Not to mention that if you choose to operate a computer at the same time as an engineer is working to find a solution to the problem, then that computer is a safety hazard. In some situations, computers can cause even more harm than harm to people. Remember that the engineering job of calculating the bridge collapse should include everything from bridge stability to the stability of structural beams. Therefore, the time that that engineer spends on that problem is critical, especially in order to help save lives.

Will Technology Save Engineers?

Will Technology Save Engineers? The Engineers' Perspective. Of course, the technology will save engineers from themselves! Engineers are well-known for their love of numbers and graphs. They love to keep all of their data organized and also very detailed. Now the big question is this: Will this system of keeping detailed and accurate records of all engineering projects for the future generations to be compromised in the name of saving engineers? As the most valuable asset to the EU, this is a huge deal. The point is that in our time and in our economy, it's only right that we get our money's worth for it. Let's start with the big scary warning: due to major technical downturns in our economy, we are losing more engineers in these years than we have in the past! I can't stand to see this. How are we going to be able to retain these great people when there are big pay cuts, fewer hours and a loss of pensions? It's not going to be a picnic! Consider this: how many Danish pension fund managers are going to allow us to lose more engineers for the sake of saving the engineers? Look, I'm not saying it's all bad, but given the direction our economy is headed in the next decade, it's a dangerous time to take shortcuts in such an important project. Also consider this: the trend towards automation has caused a huge problem for engineers. Inventors are getting the same amount of money as before, so why not save engineers and focus on technology rather than on human beings? The EnergyUnion wants the EU to lead in the adoption of these technologies. By allowing us to have more humans, the EU can keep the competition from happening. Would the next generation of engineers to give them the credit they deserve if these companies couldn't make enough money to keep those engineers? The Engineers' Perspective. We should embrace this new technologies! Give the engineers a chance to lead with technology! I say let's get these technologies and let's use the engineering skills we've been taught for thousands of years and give the engineers the opportunity to make more money. Technology won't do much good if it is not used to its maximum potential. Technology is an unstoppable force and the EU wants to capture that energy. Let's get those Europeans to show off the engineering skills they've been known for!

Read the full article

[mozell2660200017-blog]

Black Coffee: Separating the Sheep from the Goats

It's time to sit back, relax and enjoy a little joe …

Welcome to another rousing edition of Black Coffee, your off-beat weekly round-up of what's been going on in the world of money and personal finance.

Let's get right to it this week …

Money is stored labor. Labor is part of human life. To devalue money is to debase life.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash.

- Rita Mae Brown

If wisdom were measured by the size of the beard, the goat would be a philosopher.

- Danish proverb

Credits and Debits

Debit: Amazon CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos, announced he and his wife are divorcing after 25 years of marriage. Barring the presence of a prenup, Bezos' net worth is set to drop by half - that would see him lose the “world's richest man” crown to Bill Gates, forcing him to settle for being “only” the world's fifth-richest. His wife, however, would become the world's richest woman.

Credit: On a related note, last week Amazon overtook Apple and Microsoft to become the world's largest company. Unfortunately for Mr. Bezos, while Amazon now sells more stuff than ever, they still haven't penetrated the quicky-divorce market. Yet.

Debit: Looking at the other end of the socioeconomic divide, a new study has determined that 4 in 5 American workers are living from paycheck to paycheck. Yes, yes … I know exactly what you're thinking:

Debit: But seriously, how can so many working people be living from paycheck to paycheck in a “booming” economy? For the answer, look no further than our corrupt, debt-based fiat monetary system; American living standards have been steadily dropping ever since the US dollar's anchor to gold was broken in 1971. And things will only continue to get worse while the current monetary system remains in place.

Debit: By the way, those American workers who are barely making ends meet will be dismayed to learn that JP Morgan is now pegging the odds of a recession at 60% within the next year. What makes this notable is two months ago the very same JP Morgan forecast a 60% chance of recession … two years from now. Did I mention that unemployment more than doubled during the last recession in 2009? It did.

Debit: Indeed, the crashing oil, banking and utility sectors, coupled with slumping home and auto sales, are now at levels not seen since 2008. Of course, this suggests the global economy is headed for a severe recession, which explains the recent rotation into US Treasury bonds - and the resulting decline in interest rates. That makes perfect sense, especially with global confidence in the dollar stronger than ever. Oh, wait …

Credit: Hedge fund manager Harris Kupperman warns that, “When the (stock) bubble unwinds, it will be fast and vicious as there is no natural buyer for a money losing business that's run out of capital. It took half a decade to create the Internet bubble, yet it all vaporized in a few months; this bubble will collapse at a similar rate.” That's bad news for companies like Uber, Tesla, and Twitter. Probably Amazon too.

Debit: Falling stock prices are bad news for pensions too. Thanks to the Fed's decade-long low interest rate policy, the only hope pension managers had of meeting 8% return goals was by stretching into high-risk assets, which are now imploding. The US pension funding shortfall - public and private - is now $6.2 trillion. If the last two cycles are any indication, the next market downturn could see that triple. Yikes.

Debit: With the stakes so high, it's no wonder Fed chairman Jay Powell announced last week that rate hikes are off until further notice and that he's even looking at scaling back the Fed's liquidity-draining quantitative tightening program. Since then, stocks have been rallying. Hard. As macroeconomist Jim Rickards notes, “If you need proof that today's rigged markets still require Fed support, there it is.” Uh huh. Speaking of unwelcome support …

Credit: Meanwhile, Fitch is threatening to cut the United States' AAA credit rating. According to Fitch's global head of sovereign ratings, James McCormack, “There is a meaningful fiscal deterioration going on. If this shutdown continues … we may need to start thinking about whether that is consistent with AAA.” Psst. Hey, Mr. McCormack … that “fiscal deterioration” has officially been in hyperdrive for a decade now.

Credit: So, with the US economy now completely dependent on the Fed's printing press, it's no wonder that the world's largest hedge fund manager, Ray Dalio, all but admitted last week that the US dollar's time as the global reserve currency is coming to an end. No, he didn't say when. Frankly, I don't think he'll have to wait too long.

By the Numbers

Here's a summary of investment returns by asset class in 2018:

0.0% US Treasury Bonds

-1.5% Gold

-4.4% S&P 500

-4.4% Nasdaq

-6.0% Dow

-8.6% Silver

-11.0% Russell 2000

The Question of the Week

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Last Week's Poll Result

What is the brand of your mobile phone?

Apple (42%)

Something else. (33%)

Samsung (20%)

I don't own a mobile phone. (5%)

More than 1400 people responded to last week's question and it turns out that, when it comes to mobile phones, slightly more than twice as many Len Penzo dot Com readers own Apple as Samsung. Another third own a different brand, while 1 in 20 say they don't have a mobile phone. I've got an Apple, but I didn't pay for it - my employer did!

Useless News: The Forbidden Island

A Frenchman, an Englishman, and a New Yorker launched an expedition and discovered an uncharted island.

Unfortunately, the island was home to a tribe of cannibals. Soon enough the three men were ambushed and overrun. They were then tied up and taken to see the tribe's chief.

“You were forbidden from setting foot on this island!” the chief said. “We're going to eat you and use your skins to build a canoe. However, we're not without compassion - we'll let you choose how you're going to die.”

The Englishman said, “Give me a gun.” So the cannibal chief handed him a gun. The Englishman then raised the gun to his head and yelled, “God save the Queen!” before blowing his brains out.

The Frenchman and the New Yorker watched as the cannibals proceeded to skin the dead Englishman.

Inspired by the Englishman's bravery, the Frenchman then said, “Give me a sword.” So his wish was granted and he yelled “Viva la France!” before impaling himself.

The cannibals then skinned the Frenchman.

Finally, it was the New Yorker's turn. “Gimme a fork!” he demanded. The cannibal chief complied, and the New Yorker then jabbed himself over and over with the fork until he was covered with thousands of blood-oozing holes.

Puzzled at the spectacle he just witnessed, the cannibal chief asked the New Yorker, “So … any last words?”

“Yeah,” said the New Yorker. “There goes your God damn canoe!”

(h/t: resistedliving via Zero Hedge)

Other Useless News

Here are the top - and bottom - five states in terms of the average number of pages viewed per visit here at Len Penzo dot Com over the past 30 days:

1. New Mexico (3.13 pages/visit) !! 2. West Virginia (2.65) ! 3. Alaska (2.18) 4. Idaho (2.11) 5. Arkansas (1.86)

46. Hawaii (1.23) 47. Oklahoma (1.20) 48. Vermont (1.19) 49. Mississippi (1.14) 50. Wyoming (1.04)

Whether you happen to enjoy what you're reading (like my friends in New Mexico) - or not (ahem, Wyoming …) - please don't forget to:

1. Click on that Like button in the sidebar to your right and become a fan of Len Penzo dot Com on Facebook!

2. Make sure you follow me on Twitter!

3. Subscribe via email too!

And last, but not least …

4. Consider becoming a Len Penzo dot Com Insider! Thank you.

Letters, I Get Letters

Every week I feature the most interesting question or comment - assuming I get one, that is. And folks who are lucky enough to have the only question in the mailbag get their letter highlighted here whether it's interesting or not! You can reach out to me at: Len@LenPenzo.com

From Terri, who left an urgent request in my inbox this week:

Pick me! Pick me! Pick me! PICK ME!

Okay, Terri … I'm picking you! But if this ends up being the highlight of your week, then we really need to talk.

If you enjoyed this, please forward it to your friends and family. I'm Len Penzo and I approved this message.

Photo Credit: brendan-c

[deborahringgold]

This is your SolarWakeup for June 17th, 2020

2020 Solar Market. The past 10 weeks has put me on an emotional roller coaster as it pertains to the solar market. It was March 17th when shelter in place was announced in California and I texted an installer, next week you will have zero sales, what are you going to do? That was when I posted the first survey to see how many weeks solar would be at zero sales. Thankfully we never got to zero and now some installers are back above the sales numbers from early March. Non-residential installers also showed that this would be a blip and the survey for May will show the start of a split in solar. Those that are rebounding and those that couldn’t handle it. I’ll be covering the May results on a call tomorrow at 10am EST. RSVP for that call here free of charge. May Survey. Did you fill out your response for May?  Today is the last day. You can see the full results of previous surveys here Not All Rebounds Are Same. PetersenDean has filed for bankruptcy protection according to PV-Magazine reporting and is only quoting roofing projects right now. It appears that the company will blame COVID for the woes but I expect more about this story to come out. There are many installers in far less profitable markets that are rebounding nicely and adapting to the virtual environment. Get The Scale. First it was the cost of solar, then it was a lack of scale. Now pension funds not only see the returns they want, they also see the massive scale that makes deploying real dollars feasible including with great currency diversification for truly big funds. Danish fund, CIP, is targeting $15billion in investments. What To Make Of BP? The company is writing down the value of some assets by a total of over $17billion dollars and is increasing the carbon cost for its investment planning to $100 per ton in 2030. That means that fossil projects will have to overcome significant additionality for projects that are not that far away in the world of a BP. The inverse is also true, renewable energy projects will become significantly better investments with such a carbon price included and you could see the company leveraging its development, land rights and offshore infrastructure for such projects. Solar Plus Storage. Not for nothing but Vectren, the utility company HQed in Indiana is including 1GW of solar and storage in their IRP. I’m sure that Mike Pence will be lauding their foresight any minute now. Presented by Adani Green Energy. Adani is a fully integrated renewables company, from solar cell and module manufacturing to ownership and operation. The company has a top global operating and contracted pipeline of over 14 GW. Adani is the recipient of the largest solar award ever of 8 GW, which includes a single site project of 2 GW – tied for the world’s largest. No one knows mega-scale projects like Adani. 

PV-Magzine: PetersenDean, a regional solar installer and roofer, seeks chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

Reuters: UPDATE 1-Danish fund manager CIP aims for world’s largest renewable infrastructure fund

Axios: Why BP’s revealing accounting move could be a signal for oil’s future

PV-Tech: Indiana utility to replace coal with solar-plus-storage, Wood bags Virginia EPC deals

New York Times: PG&E Pleads Guilty to 84 Counts of Manslaughter in Camp Fire Case

Utility Dive: Utilities remain mute on FERC net metering petition, leave filing to face overwhelming opposition

Bloomberg: Before the U.S. Can Have Clean Power, It Needs More Power Lines

Opinion

Rocky Mountain Institute: The Electric Vehicle Charging No One’s Talking About (But Should Be!)

Best, Yann

The post This is your SolarWakeup for June 17th, 2020 appeared first on SolarWakeup.com.

from Solar Energy https://www.solarwakeup.com/2020/06/17/this-is-your-solarwakeup-for-october-18th-2019-2-2-2-2-2-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-5-7/

[mikemortgage]

Brookfield weighs potential bid for Dutch Royal KPN phone company

Brookfield Asset Management Inc. is considering making an offer for Dutch phone company Royal KPN NV, according to people familiar with the matter. KPN shares jumped the most since 2013.

Canada’s largest alternative asset manager is holding exploratory talks with Dutch pension funds PGGM and APG Groep NV about partnering on a potential bid for KPN, said the people who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public. The company had a market value of about 10.6 billion euros (US$12.2 billion) on Wednesday, before Brookfield’s deliberations were reported.

Brookfield hasn’t approached KPN yet and discussions are at an early stage, the people said. The firm may opt to not proceed with an offer, they said.

Brookfield in talks to invest in Dubai property developer Meraas

Brookfield in talks to sell IDI Logistics to Caisse de dépôt’s real estate arm, sources say

What retail apocalypse? Brookfield bets malls have a future with $15-billion GGP takeover

Representatives for Brookfield, KPN and PGGM declined to comment. APG didn’t immediately respond to a request.

“If such a transaction would go through, it would lift the whole telco sector, potentially massively, because it could imply that you will see more M&A,” said Emmanuel Carlier, an analyst at Kempen & Co., in an interview. Success with this deal could imply future interest from bidders beyond pension funds and may drive cross-border consolidation in the industry, he said.

KPN shares gained 6.5 per cent at 1:50 p.m. in Amsterdam trading after earlier rising as much as 11 per cent, their largest intraday gain since August 2013. The Stoxx 600 Telecommunications Index rose as much as 1.5 percent.

KPN rebuffed a takeover bid in 2013 from America Movil SAB, the Latin American mobile-phone operator controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim. America Movil is KPN’s largest shareholder, with a 16 per cent stake as of September, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. An independent foundation, set up to protect the interests of KPN’s stakeholders, impeded America Movil’s offer by using a protective measure to temporarily gain about half of KPN’s stock.

KPN, a former monopoly, is contending with a tough competitive landscape in the Netherlands, where rivals have been merging to stay in the game. Fierce competition from regional giants such as Vodafone Group Plc has also contributed to falling sales in recent years. Chief Executive Officer Maximo Ibarra said last year he plans to cut jobs and simplify the company’s IT systems to help profits and cash flow.

Brookfield, with more than US$330 billion in assets under management, has a long history of investing in telecom. The Toronto-based firm recently closed its US$1.1 billion purchase of an AT&T Inc. data centre business.

Nordic carrier TDC A/S agreed to sell itself to a group led by Danish pension funds and Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets last year for about 40.8 billion kroner (US$6.28 billion).

–With assistance from Thomas Seal and Thomas Pfeiffer.

Bloomberg.com

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2S0STLt via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[blogcompetnetall]

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? http://www.nature-business.com/nature-where-in-the-world-is-denmarks-2-billion/

Nature

Image

CreditCreditQuickhoney

As large as it is, the building would be easy to miss. Plain, gray and near a McDonald’s, it’s part of a generic office complex surrounded by a vast parking lot in a suburb of Copenhagen. “Danish Tax Agency” is stenciled in both English and Danish on a glass front door.

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history. For three years, starting in 2012, so much money gushed from an office here that it was as though the state had sprung a gigantic leak.

Prosecutors in Copenhagen say it was an elaborate ruse, one that ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 billion — a spectacular sum for Denmark, the equivalent of a $110 billion loss in the far larger American economy.

The country had fallen victim to a dubious financial maneuver at the intersection of the tax system and capital markets, a dizzyingly complex transaction known as a “cum-ex” trade.

The trade is focused on one of the dullest, most overlooked acts in any financial system — the request for refunds on taxes withheld on dividends. Under Danish law, the government automatically collects taxes on dividends paid out by companies to their shareholders. If the shareholders live in the United States, they are eligible for a refund on some or all of those taxes.

A tiny department in SKAT, run by one man, approved thousands of applications for refunds. Most of the applications were filed by self-directed pension plans in the United States, a type of retirement account for individuals.

But experts and lawyers familiar with the scheme say those people were fronts for cum-ex trades. Deploying a kind of financial sleight of hand, the trades made it appear as if the pension plans had purchased shares of Danish companies and paid taxes on the dividends. Neither was true.

To the Danes, it was a fraud, one executed and conceived by Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier. With an assist from employees, he found the Americans, helped facilitate the applications and ended up with much of the money.

Mr. Shah denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole. He now lives in Dubai, where he owns a $1.3 million yacht and a 10,000-square-foot villa with access to the beach. He has become Denmark’s national villain.

“You have this guy, living off fraud, it��s infuriating,” said Joachim B. Olsen, a member of the Danish Parliament and chairman of its Finance Committee. “The expectation of the Danish people is that we will go after him, no matter the cost.”

Since May, the cost has included hiring an American law firm to sue 277 of the self-directed pension plans and their owners who applied for all those tax refunds. But the true toll of this scandal can’t be measured in kroner. It has undermined trust in Danish politics and it has severely dented the country’s self-image as a bastion of honest, efficient government. An unfolding $230 billion money-laundering fiasco at Danske Bank, the country’s largest lender, has only deepened the gloom.

Image

Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier, who Danish authorities say conceived and executed the scheme in Denmark. He denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole.CreditStuart Williamson

What has made the dividend debacle even more painful is that many here believe it was an inside job. The lone employee approving those tax refunds was a lifelong civil servant named Sven Nielsen. After a lengthy investigation, the police learned that Mr. Nielsen had spent a few boozy and convivial evenings with an employee of Mr. Shah’s, although they found no evidence that he had colluded or profited in any way.

Instead, they discovered evidence that years ago, Mr. Nielsen had helped an old friend bilk SKAT in a relatively small scam. Through his lawyer, Mr. Nielsen declined to comment — from prison, where he is now serving a six-year sentence for criminal fraud in that case.

So, Danes are left with a mystery that belongs in a Nordic noir, one with elements of farce and filled with enraging twists. Is Mr. Nielsen a co-conspirator, or a dupe? Is he a criminal or a man so flattered by attention that his critical faculties abandoned him?

The other mystery concerns Mr. Shah, who is now rebranding himself as a philanthropist, raising money for autism research by promoting concerts in Dubai with performers like Flo Rida and Lenny Kravitz. He has been formally termed a suspect by Danish authorities, but to the collective amazement of the Danes no criminal charges have been filed against him.

A spokesman for the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime would not say why. Instead, with impeccable Scandinavian restraint he said only that the case involves people “who seem to have used a very crafty setup.”

Finding His Calling

Mr. Shah declined to be interviewed for this article. To offer his version of events, he provided through his publicist a 14-page handwritten letter that outlined his career. And for added personal details, there is a series of autobiographical videos that he posted two years ago on YouTube, titled “I Am Sanjay Shah.”

In each, he sits in a spacious living room in a house in Dubai and muses about his life and business philosophy, omitting any hint of controversy. He comes across as an upbeat, middle-aged expat with an abiding fondness for music. After a midlife crisis, he founded Autism Rocks and became a part-time concert promoter, at one point booking his personal favorite, Prince. Mr. Shah also has a taste for the extravagant. In one video, he said that sports cars parked outside the office at Merrill Lynch, where he worked early on, inspired him to consider a new career.

“I said to my boss, ‘Who drives these cars?’” he recalled in the video. “And he said the traders do on the fifth floor. So then I decided that I wanted to be one of those people.”

Mr. Shah was raised in London by parents of Indian ancestry who had immigrated from Kenya. He dropped out of college in 1992, citing a lack of motivation, and worked at a number of large financial firms. In 2007, he landed a job at the London office of Rabobank, a Dutch company, on the dividend arbitrage desk.

There he learned about cum-ex trades. The term is Latin for “with-without” and refers to the status of shares before and after a dividend is issued. Cum-ex trades would quickly become the focus of Mr. Shah’s professional life.

Around the time of the global financial crisis, Rabobank closed its dividend arbitrage desk. While former colleagues scrambled to look for careers in other fields, Mr. Shah boldly opened his own firm, Solo Capital, with an office of eight employees. At the same time, he did something unusual for a man starting a business in London. He and his family moved to Dubai, “mainly for the weather and the lifestyle,” he explained in a video.

As economies around the globe reeled, Mr. Shah found himself in one of the few growth segments in banking. Cum-ex trades are made possible by tax treaties between countries, agreements that are intended to prevent double taxation. Denmark has such a treaty with the United States.

Image

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

What government regulators throughout Europe failed to foresee was that foreign dividend tax refunds could yield immense and dubious profits. After the financial meltdown, dozens of German banks desperate for a new source of profits eagerly facilitated cum-ex trades, fueled by capital from all over the world.

Traders made off with more than $11 billion, according to officials there. Cum-ex would reap fortunes from the governments in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, too.

It took years for the German authorities, who banned the practice in 2012, to figure out what had hit them. The first cum-ex indictments in the country were filed in May.

“It turned out to be one of the biggest financial scandals that Europe has ever seen,” said Bastian Finkel, a tax lawyer at BLD, a law firm in Cologne, “and all the more painful because it’s public money.”

In the wake of their losses, the authorities in Germany didn’t bother to alert other countries, and speculators moved elsewhere. The biggest target, it turned out, was Denmark.

Under the terms of an American-Danish tax agreement, Americans who own shares in, for instance, Carlsberg can get a full or partial refund on the 27 percent withheld for tax on dividends. Retirement accounts get the best deal of all. They get all 27 percent of the tax back.

To scale up his cum-ex trade, Mr. Shah needed individuals in the United States with self-directed pension plans, a type of retirement account that allows owners to invest in a wide range of financial instruments. By 2012, he had found more than a dozen of them — which turned out to be plenty.

A Man With 44 Pension Plans

The names of these Americans who owned the self-directed pension plans became public this summer, when Danish authorities sued them, hoping to recover lost funds. Exactly how these people linked up with Solo Capital is unknown. Mr. Shah’s publicist would say only that they came via wealth management advisory firms.

There are demographic patterns. Most live on the East Coast, with clusters in New York, New Jersey and Florida. At least five different plans used the same mailing address, 425 West 23rd Street, Apartment 7B, New York, N.Y. The current tenant there had never heard of the Danish lawsuits, but said he had received mail for one of the defendants, Gavin Crescenzo, a previous occupant.

Nearly all the defendants have jobs in finance, though one, Michael Ben-Jacob, is a partner at a prestigious law firm, Arnold & Porter. He declined to discuss the case and a spokeswoman at the firm said it did not comment on litigation in progress.

Many people have their names attached to dozens of pension plans, which is why there are 277 suits and roughly 17 defendants. A 30-year-old named Roger Lehman, for instance, opened 44 plans in a handful of states, with names such as the Ludlow Holdings 401K Plan and the Hotel Fromance Pension Plan.

Mr. Shah said through his spokesman that Solo Capital worked with 200 of these pension plans. He declined to identify which ones.

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John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases — then suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

None of the defendants responded to requests for comment. In July, though, an email response came instead, unbidden, from a law firm in Luxembourg called Schaffelhuber Müller & Kollegen. A partner there named Helene Schwiering stated that her clients, whom she did not name, would appreciate it “if you henceforth refrain from attempting to contact them.”

On paper, the owners of the plans pocketed most of SKAT’s $2 billion. In reality, these people probably wound up with little or none of the money.

That, at least, is the impression of John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases, then he suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.

The withdrawal filings were revealing. They stated that Mr. Hanamirian was not paid by defendants named in the lawsuits. Rather, his bills were paid by what he described only as a “Luxembourg law firm.” And that law firm would not provide needed files about his defendants, “despite repeated requests,” he wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Hanamirian elaborated. The firm was the one in Luxembourg that sent that out-of-the-blue email asking that defendants in the cases be left alone.

“I needed documents surrounding their involvement, whatever that is — bank statements, investment statements, communications,” Mr. Hanamirian said. “The firm wouldn’t do it. They said, ‘We’ll meet you in advance, the day of the proceedings.’ I said that’s unacceptable.”

Before exiting the cases, Mr. Hanamirian spoke to a handful of clients who told him that money went in and then was immediately moved out of their accounts. Whether the defendants earned a fee of some kind is unknown to Mr. Hanamirian, as is the ultimate destination of the funds.

“I don’t want any of this to reflect on my former clients,” he said. “But the whole thing was definitely odd.”

$3 Million, Every Hour

In 2013, all that stood between Solo Capital and Denmark’s treasury was the bespectacled, gray-haired veteran of SKAT, Sven Nielsen. After two colleagues retired, he was the last person in the Dividend Department. Complicating matters, he lacked the tools to perform the most basic due diligence when reviewing refund applications.

The agency was in the midst of a yearslong and often disastrous overhaul, meant to digitize the system and reduce head count. The priority was helping Danish taxpayers, not foreign shareholders. Mr. Nielsen didn’t even have a database to check whether an individual pension plan actually owned the shares it claimed, said Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013.

“Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”

There was another problem that nobody knew about then: Mr. Nielsen could be persuaded to break the law. When the Danish police searched his home after the Solo Capital revelations, they found a letter showing that in 2007, he helped an old friend illegally secure $5.7 million from SKAT. (The two men knew each other from the days when Mr. Nielsen moonlighted with a job delivering newspapers.) Last December, prosecutors convicted Mr. Nielsen of fraud for taking a kickback, the equivalent of $315,000, for his efforts.

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A restaurant in downtown Copenhagen where Mr. Nielsen was said to have been taken.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

Defenders of Mr. Nielsen maintain that he is a fundamentally decent guy who made a serious mistake under the suasion of a pal. True or not, Mr. Nielsen had a new pal in 2014, just as the SKAT payouts soared.

His name was Camilo Vargas. He worked in London at one of a small number of “payment agents,” niche companies that handle the array of paperwork submitted to foreign tax authorities for refunds. Mr. Vargas had just founded his own payment agent firm, which he called Syntax GIS. Soon after Syntax began operations, it started working with Sanjay Shah, who eventually bought the company.

During the first of several trips to Copenhagen, Mr. Vargas sought out Mr. Nielsen, asking for guidance on how to fill out Danish tax refund applications. What is known about those meetings comes from the one interview Mr. Nielsen has ever given, in a 2016 documentary that ran on DR, Denmark’s version of the BBC. Mr. Nielsen appeared to be flattered by the attention and happy to provide advice.

He just as gladly accepted invitations to dinner. Mr. Nielsen described in the interview a lively evening drinking beer with Mr. Vargas in a popular downtown area in Copenhagen.

“We walked down Stroget,” he said, referring to a famous pedestrian street, “and made several pit stops.”

The friendship was fantastically lucrative. In 2014, more than $590 million was paid on 1,500 refund applications. Danish authorities believe most of them came from Solo Capital clients. In the first seven months of 2015, the figures soared to roughly $1.2 billion, paid to more than 2,500 applications — about 16 applications every working day.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Nielsen that Camilo Vargas was playing him.

“At no point did I get the impression that he wanted to trick me or cheat in any way,” Mr. Nielsen said in the documentary, sounding bereft. “But that’s what it could appear like today.”

Mr. Vargas could not be located for comment. The producers at DR hired a researcher to find him, to no avail.

In the summer of 2015, the pace of applications made one final surge. In July alone, $500 million in refunds was disbursed — about $25 million per working day, $3 million every hour.

Mr. Shah may have had a hunch that the Danish tax refund machine was about to stop working. In May 2015, he met in London with his then-new compliance officer at Solo Capital, Navin Khokhrai. As Mr. Shah put it in the handwritten letter provided by his publicist, Mr. Khokhrai expressed profound reservations about Solo Capital’s business, telling his boss that he was unsure “whether the company was processing the trades correctly.” Mr. Shah assured him that he’d obtained all necessary legal clearances.

Mr. Khokhrai was apparently not convinced. He resigned soon after and Mr. Shah stated in the same handwritten letter that his former employee “submitted a whistle-blower letter to HMRC” — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — “alleging that Solo had created fictitious client accounts and trading records in order to defraud the tax authorities in Denmark and Belgium.”

In August 2015, the dividends stopped flowing out of SKAT, though not because of sirens set off by anyone inside the agency. Rather, it took a tip from the British government to end the scheme, several Danish politicians said. The London offices of Solo Capital were later raided by Britain’s National Crime Agency and by July 2016 Solo Capital closed.

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Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013. “Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

At the time, Mr. Shah said he had done nothing improper. “Had they accused a large bank like Goldman Sachs the bank would have kicked back with a large team of lawyers,” he told Borsen, a Danish newspaper. “It’s easier to target a single individual.”

‘This Was Fraud’

Danish authorities have been trying to unravel Mr. Shah’s handiwork for over three years. Much of his modus operandi was revealed, experts believe, in 2017 when police in Germany, who were acting at the behest of the Danes, used a search warrant to sift through the records of North Channel Bank, a small bank in Mainz, a city outside Frankfurt. A team of 60 investigators found that the bank was used by 27 of the American pension plans, which were ultimately paid a total of about $168 million by SKAT.

What investigators found is that the accounts didn’t actually own any shares of Danish companies, said Prof. Christoph Spengel, who served as an adviser to Germany’s Parliament during an inquiry into the questionable trades. He studied the results of the North Channel investigation, issued in a report by a German district attorney. He said that the 27 plans primarily traded with one another. One would place an order to short a chunk of shares of Danish stock — essentially, a promise to buy the shares once they dipped below a certain price.

Soon after, an order was placed by another of the 27 plans to buy the order for the shorted shares. That open buy order — essentially, a promise to purchase shares that the other plan still didn’t own — was proof enough for SKAT to approve a refund. Once the refund was issued, the buy order was canceled.

“This wasn’t a transaction, this wasn’t tax planning,” Professor Spengel said. “This was fraud.”

A spokeswoman for North Channel said the bank was cooperating with the authorities and had no comment.

After funds were wired to North Bank, Professor Spengel said, they were shunted to two banks, first in London, then another in Germany. Finally, he said, they were sent to accounts controlled by Mr. Shah and his wife, Usha.

Jack Irvine, Mr. Shah’s spokesman, said none of this was true.

“Neither Solo nor Sanjay have had anything to do with North Channel Bank,” he wrote in an email, “so there appears to be confusion, which is not unusual in this case.”

There has been outrage in Denmark over the SKAT scandal but so far the repercussions have been surprisingly limited. No ministers have been fired. The director of SKAT was laid off in August 2016, though Mr. Shah’s machinations were among several causes. A new investigation into the cum-ex disaster was ordered by the justice minister in February, which could last years. For now, politicians here seem to emphasize pragmatism over finger-pointing.

“In the past, governments have fallen because of investigations like this,” said Jesper Petersen, a member of the opposition Social Democratic Party. “But we have yet to find any minister who saw evidence of this problem and ignored it.”

Sanjay Shah is preoccupied with his own troubles. In mid-September, a High Court of Justice judge in London entered a $1.3 billion default judgment against Solo Capital and a company it owned, Elysium Global, in a case filed by SKAT alleging fraud. Mr. Shah’s spokesman said his client didn’t respond to the lawsuit because both companies are now controlled by liquidators.

He also said that at the prodding of Danish officials, Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates have all frozen, though not confiscated, $660 million in assets belonging to Mr. Shah. The financial pinch is enough that Mr. Shah has been forced to put his house up for sale, the publicist added. Out of caution, the publicist said, Mr. Shah does not travel.

Fears of arrest and extradition are justified, said Henning Sorensen, an associate law professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

“Shah is free as long as he stays in Dubai,” he said. “He is like a bird living in a golden cage.”

Alain Delaquérière and Martin Selsoe Sorensen contributed reporting.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/business/denmark-skat-tax-scandal.html |

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?, in 2018-10-05 17:45:18

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Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? http://www.nature-business.com/nature-where-in-the-world-is-denmarks-2-billion/

Nature

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CreditCreditQuickhoney

As large as it is, the building would be easy to miss. Plain, gray and near a McDonald’s, it’s part of a generic office complex surrounded by a vast parking lot in a suburb of Copenhagen. “Danish Tax Agency” is stenciled in both English and Danish on a glass front door.

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history. For three years, starting in 2012, so much money gushed from an office here that it was as though the state had sprung a gigantic leak.

Prosecutors in Copenhagen say it was an elaborate ruse, one that ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 billion — a spectacular sum for Denmark, the equivalent of a $110 billion loss in the far larger American economy.

The country had fallen victim to a dubious financial maneuver at the intersection of the tax system and capital markets, a dizzyingly complex transaction known as a “cum-ex” trade.

The trade is focused on one of the dullest, most overlooked acts in any financial system — the request for refunds on taxes withheld on dividends. Under Danish law, the government automatically collects taxes on dividends paid out by companies to their shareholders. If the shareholders live in the United States, they are eligible for a refund on some or all of those taxes.

A tiny department in SKAT, run by one man, approved thousands of applications for refunds. Most of the applications were filed by self-directed pension plans in the United States, a type of retirement account for individuals.

But experts and lawyers familiar with the scheme say those people were fronts for cum-ex trades. Deploying a kind of financial sleight of hand, the trades made it appear as if the pension plans had purchased shares of Danish companies and paid taxes on the dividends. Neither was true.

To the Danes, it was a fraud, one executed and conceived by Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier. With an assist from employees, he found the Americans, helped facilitate the applications and ended up with much of the money.

Mr. Shah denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole. He now lives in Dubai, where he owns a $1.3 million yacht and a 10,000-square-foot villa with access to the beach. He has become Denmark’s national villain.

“You have this guy, living off fraud, it’s infuriating,” said Joachim B. Olsen, a member of the Danish Parliament and chairman of its Finance Committee. “The expectation of the Danish people is that we will go after him, no matter the cost.”

Since May, the cost has included hiring an American law firm to sue 277 of the self-directed pension plans and their owners who applied for all those tax refunds. But the true toll of this scandal can’t be measured in kroner. It has undermined trust in Danish politics and it has severely dented the country’s self-image as a bastion of honest, efficient government. An unfolding $230 billion money-laundering fiasco at Danske Bank, the country’s largest lender, has only deepened the gloom.

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Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier, who Danish authorities say conceived and executed the scheme in Denmark. He denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole.CreditStuart Williamson

What has made the dividend debacle even more painful is that many here believe it was an inside job. The lone employee approving those tax refunds was a lifelong civil servant named Sven Nielsen. After a lengthy investigation, the police learned that Mr. Nielsen had spent a few boozy and convivial evenings with an employee of Mr. Shah’s, although they found no evidence that he had colluded or profited in any way.

Instead, they discovered evidence that years ago, Mr. Nielsen had helped an old friend bilk SKAT in a relatively small scam. Through his lawyer, Mr. Nielsen declined to comment — from prison, where he is now serving a six-year sentence for criminal fraud in that case.

So, Danes are left with a mystery that belongs in a Nordic noir, one with elements of farce and filled with enraging twists. Is Mr. Nielsen a co-conspirator, or a dupe? Is he a criminal or a man so flattered by attention that his critical faculties abandoned him?

The other mystery concerns Mr. Shah, who is now rebranding himself as a philanthropist, raising money for autism research by promoting concerts in Dubai with performers like Flo Rida and Lenny Kravitz. He has been formally termed a suspect by Danish authorities, but to the collective amazement of the Danes no criminal charges have been filed against him.

A spokesman for the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime would not say why. Instead, with impeccable Scandinavian restraint he said only that the case involves people “who seem to have used a very crafty setup.”

Finding His Calling

Mr. Shah declined to be interviewed for this article. To offer his version of events, he provided through his publicist a 14-page handwritten letter that outlined his career. And for added personal details, there is a series of autobiographical videos that he posted two years ago on YouTube, titled “I Am Sanjay Shah.”

In each, he sits in a spacious living room in a house in Dubai and muses about his life and business philosophy, omitting any hint of controversy. He comes across as an upbeat, middle-aged expat with an abiding fondness for music. After a midlife crisis, he founded Autism Rocks and became a part-time concert promoter, at one point booking his personal favorite, Prince. Mr. Shah also has a taste for the extravagant. In one video, he said that sports cars parked outside the office at Merrill Lynch, where he worked early on, inspired him to consider a new career.

“I said to my boss, ‘Who drives these cars?’” he recalled in the video. “And he said the traders do on the fifth floor. So then I decided that I wanted to be one of those people.”

Mr. Shah was raised in London by parents of Indian ancestry who had immigrated from Kenya. He dropped out of college in 1992, citing a lack of motivation, and worked at a number of large financial firms. In 2007, he landed a job at the London office of Rabobank, a Dutch company, on the dividend arbitrage desk.

There he learned about cum-ex trades. The term is Latin for “with-without” and refers to the status of shares before and after a dividend is issued. Cum-ex trades would quickly become the focus of Mr. Shah’s professional life.

Around the time of the global financial crisis, Rabobank closed its dividend arbitrage desk. While former colleagues scrambled to look for careers in other fields, Mr. Shah boldly opened his own firm, Solo Capital, with an office of eight employees. At the same time, he did something unusual for a man starting a business in London. He and his family moved to Dubai, “mainly for the weather and the lifestyle,” he explained in a video.

As economies around the globe reeled, Mr. Shah found himself in one of the few growth segments in banking. Cum-ex trades are made possible by tax treaties between countries, agreements that are intended to prevent double taxation. Denmark has such a treaty with the United States.

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This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

What government regulators throughout Europe failed to foresee was that foreign dividend tax refunds could yield immense and dubious profits. After the financial meltdown, dozens of German banks desperate for a new source of profits eagerly facilitated cum-ex trades, fueled by capital from all over the world.

Traders made off with more than $11 billion, according to officials there. Cum-ex would reap fortunes from the governments in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, too.

It took years for the German authorities, who banned the practice in 2012, to figure out what had hit them. The first cum-ex indictments in the country were filed in May.

“It turned out to be one of the biggest financial scandals that Europe has ever seen,” said Bastian Finkel, a tax lawyer at BLD, a law firm in Cologne, “and all the more painful because it’s public money.”

In the wake of their losses, the authorities in Germany didn’t bother to alert other countries, and speculators moved elsewhere. The biggest target, it turned out, was Denmark.

Under the terms of an American-Danish tax agreement, Americans who own shares in, for instance, Carlsberg can get a full or partial refund on the 27 percent withheld for tax on dividends. Retirement accounts get the best deal of all. They get all 27 percent of the tax back.

To scale up his cum-ex trade, Mr. Shah needed individuals in the United States with self-directed pension plans, a type of retirement account that allows owners to invest in a wide range of financial instruments. By 2012, he had found more than a dozen of them — which turned out to be plenty.

A Man With 44 Pension Plans

The names of these Americans who owned the self-directed pension plans became public this summer, when Danish authorities sued them, hoping to recover lost funds. Exactly how these people linked up with Solo Capital is unknown. Mr. Shah’s publicist would say only that they came via wealth management advisory firms.

There are demographic patterns. Most live on the East Coast, with clusters in New York, New Jersey and Florida. At least five different plans used the same mailing address, 425 West 23rd Street, Apartment 7B, New York, N.Y. The current tenant there had never heard of the Danish lawsuits, but said he had received mail for one of the defendants, Gavin Crescenzo, a previous occupant.

Nearly all the defendants have jobs in finance, though one, Michael Ben-Jacob, is a partner at a prestigious law firm, Arnold & Porter. He declined to discuss the case and a spokeswoman at the firm said it did not comment on litigation in progress.

Many people have their names attached to dozens of pension plans, which is why there are 277 suits and roughly 17 defendants. A 30-year-old named Roger Lehman, for instance, opened 44 plans in a handful of states, with names such as the Ludlow Holdings 401K Plan and the Hotel Fromance Pension Plan.

Mr. Shah said through his spokesman that Solo Capital worked with 200 of these pension plans. He declined to identify which ones.

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John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases — then suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

None of the defendants responded to requests for comment. In July, though, an email response came instead, unbidden, from a law firm in Luxembourg called Schaffelhuber Müller & Kollegen. A partner there named Helene Schwiering stated that her clients, whom she did not name, would appreciate it “if you henceforth refrain from attempting to contact them.”

On paper, the owners of the plans pocketed most of SKAT’s $2 billion. In reality, these people probably wound up with little or none of the money.

That, at least, is the impression of John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases, then he suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.

The withdrawal filings were revealing. They stated that Mr. Hanamirian was not paid by defendants named in the lawsuits. Rather, his bills were paid by what he described only as a “Luxembourg law firm.” And that law firm would not provide needed files about his defendants, “despite repeated requests,” he wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Hanamirian elaborated. The firm was the one in Luxembourg that sent that out-of-the-blue email asking that defendants in the cases be left alone.

“I needed documents surrounding their involvement, whatever that is — bank statements, investment statements, communications,” Mr. Hanamirian said. “The firm wouldn’t do it. They said, ‘We’ll meet you in advance, the day of the proceedings.’ I said that’s unacceptable.”

Before exiting the cases, Mr. Hanamirian spoke to a handful of clients who told him that money went in and then was immediately moved out of their accounts. Whether the defendants earned a fee of some kind is unknown to Mr. Hanamirian, as is the ultimate destination of the funds.

“I don’t want any of this to reflect on my former clients,” he said. “But the whole thing was definitely odd.”

$3 Million, Every Hour

In 2013, all that stood between Solo Capital and Denmark’s treasury was the bespectacled, gray-haired veteran of SKAT, Sven Nielsen. After two colleagues retired, he was the last person in the Dividend Department. Complicating matters, he lacked the tools to perform the most basic due diligence when reviewing refund applications.

The agency was in the midst of a yearslong and often disastrous overhaul, meant to digitize the system and reduce head count. The priority was helping Danish taxpayers, not foreign shareholders. Mr. Nielsen didn’t even have a database to check whether an individual pension plan actually owned the shares it claimed, said Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013.

“Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”

There was another problem that nobody knew about then: Mr. Nielsen could be persuaded to break the law. When the Danish police searched his home after the Solo Capital revelations, they found a letter showing that in 2007, he helped an old friend illegally secure $5.7 million from SKAT. (The two men knew each other from the days when Mr. Nielsen moonlighted with a job delivering newspapers.) Last December, prosecutors convicted Mr. Nielsen of fraud for taking a kickback, the equivalent of $315,000, for his efforts.

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A restaurant in downtown Copenhagen where Mr. Nielsen was said to have been taken.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

Defenders of Mr. Nielsen maintain that he is a fundamentally decent guy who made a serious mistake under the suasion of a pal. True or not, Mr. Nielsen had a new pal in 2014, just as the SKAT payouts soared.

His name was Camilo Vargas. He worked in London at one of a small number of “payment agents,” niche companies that handle the array of paperwork submitted to foreign tax authorities for refunds. Mr. Vargas had just founded his own payment agent firm, which he called Syntax GIS. Soon after Syntax began operations, it started working with Sanjay Shah, who eventually bought the company.

During the first of several trips to Copenhagen, Mr. Vargas sought out Mr. Nielsen, asking for guidance on how to fill out Danish tax refund applications. What is known about those meetings comes from the one interview Mr. Nielsen has ever given, in a 2016 documentary that ran on DR, Denmark’s version of the BBC. Mr. Nielsen appeared to be flattered by the attention and happy to provide advice.

He just as gladly accepted invitations to dinner. Mr. Nielsen described in the interview a lively evening drinking beer with Mr. Vargas in a popular downtown area in Copenhagen.

“We walked down Stroget,” he said, referring to a famous pedestrian street, “and made several pit stops.”

The friendship was fantastically lucrative. In 2014, more than $590 million was paid on 1,500 refund applications. Danish authorities believe most of them came from Solo Capital clients. In the first seven months of 2015, the figures soared to roughly $1.2 billion, paid to more than 2,500 applications — about 16 applications every working day.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Nielsen that Camilo Vargas was playing him.

“At no point did I get the impression that he wanted to trick me or cheat in any way,” Mr. Nielsen said in the documentary, sounding bereft. “But that’s what it could appear like today.”

Mr. Vargas could not be located for comment. The producers at DR hired a researcher to find him, to no avail.

In the summer of 2015, the pace of applications made one final surge. In July alone, $500 million in refunds was disbursed — about $25 million per working day, $3 million every hour.

Mr. Shah may have had a hunch that the Danish tax refund machine was about to stop working. In May 2015, he met in London with his then-new compliance officer at Solo Capital, Navin Khokhrai. As Mr. Shah put it in the handwritten letter provided by his publicist, Mr. Khokhrai expressed profound reservations about Solo Capital’s business, telling his boss that he was unsure “whether the company was processing the trades correctly.” Mr. Shah assured him that he’d obtained all necessary legal clearances.

Mr. Khokhrai was apparently not convinced. He resigned soon after and Mr. Shah stated in the same handwritten letter that his former employee “submitted a whistle-blower letter to HMRC” — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — “alleging that Solo had created fictitious client accounts and trading records in order to defraud the tax authorities in Denmark and Belgium.”

In August 2015, the dividends stopped flowing out of SKAT, though not because of sirens set off by anyone inside the agency. Rather, it took a tip from the British government to end the scheme, several Danish politicians said. The London offices of Solo Capital were later raided by Britain’s National Crime Agency and by July 2016 Solo Capital closed.

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Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013. “Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

At the time, Mr. Shah said he had done nothing improper. “Had they accused a large bank like Goldman Sachs the bank would have kicked back with a large team of lawyers,” he told Borsen, a Danish newspaper. “It’s easier to target a single individual.”

‘This Was Fraud’

Danish authorities have been trying to unravel Mr. Shah’s handiwork for over three years. Much of his modus operandi was revealed, experts believe, in 2017 when police in Germany, who were acting at the behest of the Danes, used a search warrant to sift through the records of North Channel Bank, a small bank in Mainz, a city outside Frankfurt. A team of 60 investigators found that the bank was used by 27 of the American pension plans, which were ultimately paid a total of about $168 million by SKAT.

What investigators found is that the accounts didn’t actually own any shares of Danish companies, said Prof. Christoph Spengel, who served as an adviser to Germany’s Parliament during an inquiry into the questionable trades. He studied the results of the North Channel investigation, issued in a report by a German district attorney. He said that the 27 plans primarily traded with one another. One would place an order to short a chunk of shares of Danish stock — essentially, a promise to buy the shares once they dipped below a certain price.

Soon after, an order was placed by another of the 27 plans to buy the order for the shorted shares. That open buy order — essentially, a promise to purchase shares that the other plan still didn’t own — was proof enough for SKAT to approve a refund. Once the refund was issued, the buy order was canceled.

“This wasn’t a transaction, this wasn’t tax planning,” Professor Spengel said. “This was fraud.”

A spokeswoman for North Channel said the bank was cooperating with the authorities and had no comment.

After funds were wired to North Bank, Professor Spengel said, they were shunted to two banks, first in London, then another in Germany. Finally, he said, they were sent to accounts controlled by Mr. Shah and his wife, Usha.

Jack Irvine, Mr. Shah’s spokesman, said none of this was true.

“Neither Solo nor Sanjay have had anything to do with North Channel Bank,” he wrote in an email, “so there appears to be confusion, which is not unusual in this case.”

There has been outrage in Denmark over the SKAT scandal but so far the repercussions have been surprisingly limited. No ministers have been fired. The director of SKAT was laid off in August 2016, though Mr. Shah’s machinations were among several causes. A new investigation into the cum-ex disaster was ordered by the justice minister in February, which could last years. For now, politicians here seem to emphasize pragmatism over finger-pointing.

“In the past, governments have fallen because of investigations like this,” said Jesper Petersen, a member of the opposition Social Democratic Party. “But we have yet to find any minister who saw evidence of this problem and ignored it.”

Sanjay Shah is preoccupied with his own troubles. In mid-September, a High Court of Justice judge in London entered a $1.3 billion default judgment against Solo Capital and a company it owned, Elysium Global, in a case filed by SKAT alleging fraud. Mr. Shah’s spokesman said his client didn’t respond to the lawsuit because both companies are now controlled by liquidators.

He also said that at the prodding of Danish officials, Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates have all frozen, though not confiscated, $660 million in assets belonging to Mr. Shah. The financial pinch is enough that Mr. Shah has been forced to put his house up for sale, the publicist added. Out of caution, the publicist said, Mr. Shah does not travel.

Fears of arrest and extradition are justified, said Henning Sorensen, an associate law professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

“Shah is free as long as he stays in Dubai,” he said. “He is like a bird living in a golden cage.”

Alain Delaquérière and Martin Selsoe Sorensen contributed reporting.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/business/denmark-skat-tax-scandal.html |

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?, in 2018-10-05 17:45:18

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Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? http://www.nature-business.com/nature-where-in-the-world-is-denmarks-2-billion/

Nature

Image

CreditCreditQuickhoney

As large as it is, the building would be easy to miss. Plain, gray and near a McDonald’s, it’s part of a generic office complex surrounded by a vast parking lot in a suburb of Copenhagen. “Danish Tax Agency” is stenciled in both English and Danish on a glass front door.

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history. For three years, starting in 2012, so much money gushed from an office here that it was as though the state had sprung a gigantic leak.

Prosecutors in Copenhagen say it was an elaborate ruse, one that ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 billion — a spectacular sum for Denmark, the equivalent of a $110 billion loss in the far larger American economy.

The country had fallen victim to a dubious financial maneuver at the intersection of the tax system and capital markets, a dizzyingly complex transaction known as a “cum-ex” trade.

The trade is focused on one of the dullest, most overlooked acts in any financial system — the request for refunds on taxes withheld on dividends. Under Danish law, the government automatically collects taxes on dividends paid out by companies to their shareholders. If the shareholders live in the United States, they are eligible for a refund on some or all of those taxes.

A tiny department in SKAT, run by one man, approved thousands of applications for refunds. Most of the applications were filed by self-directed pension plans in the United States, a type of retirement account for individuals.

But experts and lawyers familiar with the scheme say those people were fronts for cum-ex trades. Deploying a kind of financial sleight of hand, the trades made it appear as if the pension plans had purchased shares of Danish companies and paid taxes on the dividends. Neither was true.

To the Danes, it was a fraud, one executed and conceived by Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier. With an assist from employees, he found the Americans, helped facilitate the applications and ended up with much of the money.

Mr. Shah denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole. He now lives in Dubai, where he owns a $1.3 million yacht and a 10,000-square-foot villa with access to the beach. He has become Denmark’s national villain.

“You have this guy, living off fraud, it’s infuriating,” said Joachim B. Olsen, a member of the Danish Parliament and chairman of its Finance Committee. “The expectation of the Danish people is that we will go after him, no matter the cost.”

Since May, the cost has included hiring an American law firm to sue 277 of the self-directed pension plans and their owners who applied for all those tax refunds. But the true toll of this scandal can’t be measured in kroner. It has undermined trust in Danish politics and it has severely dented the country’s self-image as a bastion of honest, efficient government. An unfolding $230 billion money-laundering fiasco at Danske Bank, the country’s largest lender, has only deepened the gloom.

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Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier, who Danish authorities say conceived and executed the scheme in Denmark. He denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole.CreditStuart Williamson

What has made the dividend debacle even more painful is that many here believe it was an inside job. The lone employee approving those tax refunds was a lifelong civil servant named Sven Nielsen. After a lengthy investigation, the police learned that Mr. Nielsen had spent a few boozy and convivial evenings with an employee of Mr. Shah’s, although they found no evidence that he had colluded or profited in any way.

Instead, they discovered evidence that years ago, Mr. Nielsen had helped an old friend bilk SKAT in a relatively small scam. Through his lawyer, Mr. Nielsen declined to comment — from prison, where he is now serving a six-year sentence for criminal fraud in that case.

So, Danes are left with a mystery that belongs in a Nordic noir, one with elements of farce and filled with enraging twists. Is Mr. Nielsen a co-conspirator, or a dupe? Is he a criminal or a man so flattered by attention that his critical faculties abandoned him?

The other mystery concerns Mr. Shah, who is now rebranding himself as a philanthropist, raising money for autism research by promoting concerts in Dubai with performers like Flo Rida and Lenny Kravitz. He has been formally termed a suspect by Danish authorities, but to the collective amazement of the Danes no criminal charges have been filed against him.

A spokesman for the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime would not say why. Instead, with impeccable Scandinavian restraint he said only that the case involves people “who seem to have used a very crafty setup.”

Finding His Calling

Mr. Shah declined to be interviewed for this article. To offer his version of events, he provided through his publicist a 14-page handwritten letter that outlined his career. And for added personal details, there is a series of autobiographical videos that he posted two years ago on YouTube, titled “I Am Sanjay Shah.”

In each, he sits in a spacious living room in a house in Dubai and muses about his life and business philosophy, omitting any hint of controversy. He comes across as an upbeat, middle-aged expat with an abiding fondness for music. After a midlife crisis, he founded Autism Rocks and became a part-time concert promoter, at one point booking his personal favorite, Prince. Mr. Shah also has a taste for the extravagant. In one video, he said that sports cars parked outside the office at Merrill Lynch, where he worked early on, inspired him to consider a new career.

“I said to my boss, ‘Who drives these cars?’” he recalled in the video. “And he said the traders do on the fifth floor. So then I decided that I wanted to be one of those people.”

Mr. Shah was raised in London by parents of Indian ancestry who had immigrated from Kenya. He dropped out of college in 1992, citing a lack of motivation, and worked at a number of large financial firms. In 2007, he landed a job at the London office of Rabobank, a Dutch company, on the dividend arbitrage desk.

There he learned about cum-ex trades. The term is Latin for “with-without” and refers to the status of shares before and after a dividend is issued. Cum-ex trades would quickly become the focus of Mr. Shah’s professional life.

Around the time of the global financial crisis, Rabobank closed its dividend arbitrage desk. While former colleagues scrambled to look for careers in other fields, Mr. Shah boldly opened his own firm, Solo Capital, with an office of eight employees. At the same time, he did something unusual for a man starting a business in London. He and his family moved to Dubai, “mainly for the weather and the lifestyle,” he explained in a video.

As economies around the globe reeled, Mr. Shah found himself in one of the few growth segments in banking. Cum-ex trades are made possible by tax treaties between countries, agreements that are intended to prevent double taxation. Denmark has such a treaty with the United States.

Image

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

What government regulators throughout Europe failed to foresee was that foreign dividend tax refunds could yield immense and dubious profits. After the financial meltdown, dozens of German banks desperate for a new source of profits eagerly facilitated cum-ex trades, fueled by capital from all over the world.

Traders made off with more than $11 billion, according to officials there. Cum-ex would reap fortunes from the governments in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, too.

It took years for the German authorities, who banned the practice in 2012, to figure out what had hit them. The first cum-ex indictments in the country were filed in May.

“It turned out to be one of the biggest financial scandals that Europe has ever seen,” said Bastian Finkel, a tax lawyer at BLD, a law firm in Cologne, “and all the more painful because it’s public money.”

In the wake of their losses, the authorities in Germany didn’t bother to alert other countries, and speculators moved elsewhere. The biggest target, it turned out, was Denmark.

Under the terms of an American-Danish tax agreement, Americans who own shares in, for instance, Carlsberg can get a full or partial refund on the 27 percent withheld for tax on dividends. Retirement accounts get the best deal of all. They get all 27 percent of the tax back.

To scale up his cum-ex trade, Mr. Shah needed individuals in the United States with self-directed pension plans, a type of retirement account that allows owners to invest in a wide range of financial instruments. By 2012, he had found more than a dozen of them — which turned out to be plenty.

A Man With 44 Pension Plans

The names of these Americans who owned the self-directed pension plans became public this summer, when Danish authorities sued them, hoping to recover lost funds. Exactly how these people linked up with Solo Capital is unknown. Mr. Shah’s publicist would say only that they came via wealth management advisory firms.

There are demographic patterns. Most live on the East Coast, with clusters in New York, New Jersey and Florida. At least five different plans used the same mailing address, 425 West 23rd Street, Apartment 7B, New York, N.Y. The current tenant there had never heard of the Danish lawsuits, but said he had received mail for one of the defendants, Gavin Crescenzo, a previous occupant.

Nearly all the defendants have jobs in finance, though one, Michael Ben-Jacob, is a partner at a prestigious law firm, Arnold & Porter. He declined to discuss the case and a spokeswoman at the firm said it did not comment on litigation in progress.

Many people have their names attached to dozens of pension plans, which is why there are 277 suits and roughly 17 defendants. A 30-year-old named Roger Lehman, for instance, opened 44 plans in a handful of states, with names such as the Ludlow Holdings 401K Plan and the Hotel Fromance Pension Plan.

Mr. Shah said through his spokesman that Solo Capital worked with 200 of these pension plans. He declined to identify which ones.

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John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases — then suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

None of the defendants responded to requests for comment. In July, though, an email response came instead, unbidden, from a law firm in Luxembourg called Schaffelhuber Müller & Kollegen. A partner there named Helene Schwiering stated that her clients, whom she did not name, would appreciate it “if you henceforth refrain from attempting to contact them.”

On paper, the owners of the plans pocketed most of SKAT’s $2 billion. In reality, these people probably wound up with little or none of the money.

That, at least, is the impression of John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases, then he suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.

The withdrawal filings were revealing. They stated that Mr. Hanamirian was not paid by defendants named in the lawsuits. Rather, his bills were paid by what he described only as a “Luxembourg law firm.” And that law firm would not provide needed files about his defendants, “despite repeated requests,” he wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Hanamirian elaborated. The firm was the one in Luxembourg that sent that out-of-the-blue email asking that defendants in the cases be left alone.

“I needed documents surrounding their involvement, whatever that is — bank statements, investment statements, communications,” Mr. Hanamirian said. “The firm wouldn’t do it. They said, ‘We’ll meet you in advance, the day of the proceedings.’ I said that’s unacceptable.”

Before exiting the cases, Mr. Hanamirian spoke to a handful of clients who told him that money went in and then was immediately moved out of their accounts. Whether the defendants earned a fee of some kind is unknown to Mr. Hanamirian, as is the ultimate destination of the funds.

“I don’t want any of this to reflect on my former clients,” he said. “But the whole thing was definitely odd.”

$3 Million, Every Hour

In 2013, all that stood between Solo Capital and Denmark’s treasury was the bespectacled, gray-haired veteran of SKAT, Sven Nielsen. After two colleagues retired, he was the last person in the Dividend Department. Complicating matters, he lacked the tools to perform the most basic due diligence when reviewing refund applications.

The agency was in the midst of a yearslong and often disastrous overhaul, meant to digitize the system and reduce head count. The priority was helping Danish taxpayers, not foreign shareholders. Mr. Nielsen didn’t even have a database to check whether an individual pension plan actually owned the shares it claimed, said Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013.

“Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”

There was another problem that nobody knew about then: Mr. Nielsen could be persuaded to break the law. When the Danish police searched his home after the Solo Capital revelations, they found a letter showing that in 2007, he helped an old friend illegally secure $5.7 million from SKAT. (The two men knew each other from the days when Mr. Nielsen moonlighted with a job delivering newspapers.) Last December, prosecutors convicted Mr. Nielsen of fraud for taking a kickback, the equivalent of $315,000, for his efforts.

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A restaurant in downtown Copenhagen where Mr. Nielsen was said to have been taken.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

Defenders of Mr. Nielsen maintain that he is a fundamentally decent guy who made a serious mistake under the suasion of a pal. True or not, Mr. Nielsen had a new pal in 2014, just as the SKAT payouts soared.

His name was Camilo Vargas. He worked in London at one of a small number of “payment agents,” niche companies that handle the array of paperwork submitted to foreign tax authorities for refunds. Mr. Vargas had just founded his own payment agent firm, which he called Syntax GIS. Soon after Syntax began operations, it started working with Sanjay Shah, who eventually bought the company.

During the first of several trips to Copenhagen, Mr. Vargas sought out Mr. Nielsen, asking for guidance on how to fill out Danish tax refund applications. What is known about those meetings comes from the one interview Mr. Nielsen has ever given, in a 2016 documentary that ran on DR, Denmark’s version of the BBC. Mr. Nielsen appeared to be flattered by the attention and happy to provide advice.

He just as gladly accepted invitations to dinner. Mr. Nielsen described in the interview a lively evening drinking beer with Mr. Vargas in a popular downtown area in Copenhagen.

“We walked down Stroget,” he said, referring to a famous pedestrian street, “and made several pit stops.”

The friendship was fantastically lucrative. In 2014, more than $590 million was paid on 1,500 refund applications. Danish authorities believe most of them came from Solo Capital clients. In the first seven months of 2015, the figures soared to roughly $1.2 billion, paid to more than 2,500 applications — about 16 applications every working day.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Nielsen that Camilo Vargas was playing him.

“At no point did I get the impression that he wanted to trick me or cheat in any way,” Mr. Nielsen said in the documentary, sounding bereft. “But that’s what it could appear like today.”

Mr. Vargas could not be located for comment. The producers at DR hired a researcher to find him, to no avail.

In the summer of 2015, the pace of applications made one final surge. In July alone, $500 million in refunds was disbursed — about $25 million per working day, $3 million every hour.

Mr. Shah may have had a hunch that the Danish tax refund machine was about to stop working. In May 2015, he met in London with his then-new compliance officer at Solo Capital, Navin Khokhrai. As Mr. Shah put it in the handwritten letter provided by his publicist, Mr. Khokhrai expressed profound reservations about Solo Capital’s business, telling his boss that he was unsure “whether the company was processing the trades correctly.” Mr. Shah assured him that he’d obtained all necessary legal clearances.

Mr. Khokhrai was apparently not convinced. He resigned soon after and Mr. Shah stated in the same handwritten letter that his former employee “submitted a whistle-blower letter to HMRC” — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — “alleging that Solo had created fictitious client accounts and trading records in order to defraud the tax authorities in Denmark and Belgium.”

In August 2015, the dividends stopped flowing out of SKAT, though not because of sirens set off by anyone inside the agency. Rather, it took a tip from the British government to end the scheme, several Danish politicians said. The London offices of Solo Capital were later raided by Britain’s National Crime Agency and by July 2016 Solo Capital closed.

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Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013. “Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

At the time, Mr. Shah said he had done nothing improper. “Had they accused a large bank like Goldman Sachs the bank would have kicked back with a large team of lawyers,” he told Borsen, a Danish newspaper. “It’s easier to target a single individual.”

‘This Was Fraud’

Danish authorities have been trying to unravel Mr. Shah’s handiwork for over three years. Much of his modus operandi was revealed, experts believe, in 2017 when police in Germany, who were acting at the behest of the Danes, used a search warrant to sift through the records of North Channel Bank, a small bank in Mainz, a city outside Frankfurt. A team of 60 investigators found that the bank was used by 27 of the American pension plans, which were ultimately paid a total of about $168 million by SKAT.

What investigators found is that the accounts didn’t actually own any shares of Danish companies, said Prof. Christoph Spengel, who served as an adviser to Germany’s Parliament during an inquiry into the questionable trades. He studied the results of the North Channel investigation, issued in a report by a German district attorney. He said that the 27 plans primarily traded with one another. One would place an order to short a chunk of shares of Danish stock — essentially, a promise to buy the shares once they dipped below a certain price.

Soon after, an order was placed by another of the 27 plans to buy the order for the shorted shares. That open buy order — essentially, a promise to purchase shares that the other plan still didn’t own — was proof enough for SKAT to approve a refund. Once the refund was issued, the buy order was canceled.

“This wasn’t a transaction, this wasn’t tax planning,” Professor Spengel said. “This was fraud.”

A spokeswoman for North Channel said the bank was cooperating with the authorities and had no comment.

After funds were wired to North Bank, Professor Spengel said, they were shunted to two banks, first in London, then another in Germany. Finally, he said, they were sent to accounts controlled by Mr. Shah and his wife, Usha.

Jack Irvine, Mr. Shah’s spokesman, said none of this was true.

“Neither Solo nor Sanjay have had anything to do with North Channel Bank,” he wrote in an email, “so there appears to be confusion, which is not unusual in this case.”

There has been outrage in Denmark over the SKAT scandal but so far the repercussions have been surprisingly limited. No ministers have been fired. The director of SKAT was laid off in August 2016, though Mr. Shah’s machinations were among several causes. A new investigation into the cum-ex disaster was ordered by the justice minister in February, which could last years. For now, politicians here seem to emphasize pragmatism over finger-pointing.

“In the past, governments have fallen because of investigations like this,” said Jesper Petersen, a member of the opposition Social Democratic Party. “But we have yet to find any minister who saw evidence of this problem and ignored it.”

Sanjay Shah is preoccupied with his own troubles. In mid-September, a High Court of Justice judge in London entered a $1.3 billion default judgment against Solo Capital and a company it owned, Elysium Global, in a case filed by SKAT alleging fraud. Mr. Shah’s spokesman said his client didn’t respond to the lawsuit because both companies are now controlled by liquidators.

He also said that at the prodding of Danish officials, Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates have all frozen, though not confiscated, $660 million in assets belonging to Mr. Shah. The financial pinch is enough that Mr. Shah has been forced to put his house up for sale, the publicist added. Out of caution, the publicist said, Mr. Shah does not travel.

Fears of arrest and extradition are justified, said Henning Sorensen, an associate law professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

“Shah is free as long as he stays in Dubai,” he said. “He is like a bird living in a golden cage.”

Alain Delaquérière and Martin Selsoe Sorensen contributed reporting.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/business/denmark-skat-tax-scandal.html |

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?, in 2018-10-05 17:45:18

[computacionalblog]

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion? http://www.nature-business.com/nature-where-in-the-world-is-denmarks-2-billion/

Nature

Image

CreditCreditQuickhoney

As large as it is, the building would be easy to miss. Plain, gray and near a McDonald’s, it’s part of a generic office complex surrounded by a vast parking lot in a suburb of Copenhagen. “Danish Tax Agency” is stenciled in both English and Danish on a glass front door.

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history. For three years, starting in 2012, so much money gushed from an office here that it was as though the state had sprung a gigantic leak.

Prosecutors in Copenhagen say it was an elaborate ruse, one that ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 billion — a spectacular sum for Denmark, the equivalent of a $110 billion loss in the far larger American economy.

The country had fallen victim to a dubious financial maneuver at the intersection of the tax system and capital markets, a dizzyingly complex transaction known as a “cum-ex” trade.

The trade is focused on one of the dullest, most overlooked acts in any financial system — the request for refunds on taxes withheld on dividends. Under Danish law, the government automatically collects taxes on dividends paid out by companies to their shareholders. If the shareholders live in the United States, they are eligible for a refund on some or all of those taxes.

A tiny department in SKAT, run by one man, approved thousands of applications for refunds. Most of the applications were filed by self-directed pension plans in the United States, a type of retirement account for individuals.

But experts and lawyers familiar with the scheme say those people were fronts for cum-ex trades. Deploying a kind of financial sleight of hand, the trades made it appear as if the pension plans had purchased shares of Danish companies and paid taxes on the dividends. Neither was true.

To the Danes, it was a fraud, one executed and conceived by Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier. With an assist from employees, he found the Americans, helped facilitate the applications and ended up with much of the money.

Mr. Shah denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole. He now lives in Dubai, where he owns a $1.3 million yacht and a 10,000-square-foot villa with access to the beach. He has become Denmark’s national villain.

“You have this guy, living off fraud, it’s infuriating,” said Joachim B. Olsen, a member of the Danish Parliament and chairman of its Finance Committee. “The expectation of the Danish people is that we will go after him, no matter the cost.”

Since May, the cost has included hiring an American law firm to sue 277 of the self-directed pension plans and their owners who applied for all those tax refunds. But the true toll of this scandal can’t be measured in kroner. It has undermined trust in Danish politics and it has severely dented the country’s self-image as a bastion of honest, efficient government. An unfolding $230 billion money-laundering fiasco at Danske Bank, the country’s largest lender, has only deepened the gloom.

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Sanjay Shah, a 48-year-old, London-born financier, who Danish authorities say conceived and executed the scheme in Denmark. He denies any wrongdoing and through a publicist says he merely took advantage of a loophole.CreditStuart Williamson

What has made the dividend debacle even more painful is that many here believe it was an inside job. The lone employee approving those tax refunds was a lifelong civil servant named Sven Nielsen. After a lengthy investigation, the police learned that Mr. Nielsen had spent a few boozy and convivial evenings with an employee of Mr. Shah’s, although they found no evidence that he had colluded or profited in any way.

Instead, they discovered evidence that years ago, Mr. Nielsen had helped an old friend bilk SKAT in a relatively small scam. Through his lawyer, Mr. Nielsen declined to comment — from prison, where he is now serving a six-year sentence for criminal fraud in that case.

So, Danes are left with a mystery that belongs in a Nordic noir, one with elements of farce and filled with enraging twists. Is Mr. Nielsen a co-conspirator, or a dupe? Is he a criminal or a man so flattered by attention that his critical faculties abandoned him?

The other mystery concerns Mr. Shah, who is now rebranding himself as a philanthropist, raising money for autism research by promoting concerts in Dubai with performers like Flo Rida and Lenny Kravitz. He has been formally termed a suspect by Danish authorities, but to the collective amazement of the Danes no criminal charges have been filed against him.

A spokesman for the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime would not say why. Instead, with impeccable Scandinavian restraint he said only that the case involves people “who seem to have used a very crafty setup.”

Finding His Calling

Mr. Shah declined to be interviewed for this article. To offer his version of events, he provided through his publicist a 14-page handwritten letter that outlined his career. And for added personal details, there is a series of autobiographical videos that he posted two years ago on YouTube, titled “I Am Sanjay Shah.”

In each, he sits in a spacious living room in a house in Dubai and muses about his life and business philosophy, omitting any hint of controversy. He comes across as an upbeat, middle-aged expat with an abiding fondness for music. After a midlife crisis, he founded Autism Rocks and became a part-time concert promoter, at one point booking his personal favorite, Prince. Mr. Shah also has a taste for the extravagant. In one video, he said that sports cars parked outside the office at Merrill Lynch, where he worked early on, inspired him to consider a new career.

“I said to my boss, ‘Who drives these cars?’” he recalled in the video. “And he said the traders do on the fifth floor. So then I decided that I wanted to be one of those people.”

Mr. Shah was raised in London by parents of Indian ancestry who had immigrated from Kenya. He dropped out of college in 1992, citing a lack of motivation, and worked at a number of large financial firms. In 2007, he landed a job at the London office of Rabobank, a Dutch company, on the dividend arbitrage desk.

There he learned about cum-ex trades. The term is Latin for “with-without” and refers to the status of shares before and after a dividend is issued. Cum-ex trades would quickly become the focus of Mr. Shah’s professional life.

Around the time of the global financial crisis, Rabobank closed its dividend arbitrage desk. While former colleagues scrambled to look for careers in other fields, Mr. Shah boldly opened his own firm, Solo Capital, with an office of eight employees. At the same time, he did something unusual for a man starting a business in London. He and his family moved to Dubai, “mainly for the weather and the lifestyle,” he explained in a video.

As economies around the globe reeled, Mr. Shah found himself in one of the few growth segments in banking. Cum-ex trades are made possible by tax treaties between countries, agreements that are intended to prevent double taxation. Denmark has such a treaty with the United States.

Image

This outpost of SKAT, as the I.R.S. in Denmark is known, seems an improbable setting for what the authorities call one of the great financial crimes in the country’s history.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

What government regulators throughout Europe failed to foresee was that foreign dividend tax refunds could yield immense and dubious profits. After the financial meltdown, dozens of German banks desperate for a new source of profits eagerly facilitated cum-ex trades, fueled by capital from all over the world.

Traders made off with more than $11 billion, according to officials there. Cum-ex would reap fortunes from the governments in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, too.

It took years for the German authorities, who banned the practice in 2012, to figure out what had hit them. The first cum-ex indictments in the country were filed in May.

“It turned out to be one of the biggest financial scandals that Europe has ever seen,” said Bastian Finkel, a tax lawyer at BLD, a law firm in Cologne, “and all the more painful because it’s public money.”

In the wake of their losses, the authorities in Germany didn’t bother to alert other countries, and speculators moved elsewhere. The biggest target, it turned out, was Denmark.

Under the terms of an American-Danish tax agreement, Americans who own shares in, for instance, Carlsberg can get a full or partial refund on the 27 percent withheld for tax on dividends. Retirement accounts get the best deal of all. They get all 27 percent of the tax back.

To scale up his cum-ex trade, Mr. Shah needed individuals in the United States with self-directed pension plans, a type of retirement account that allows owners to invest in a wide range of financial instruments. By 2012, he had found more than a dozen of them — which turned out to be plenty.

A Man With 44 Pension Plans

The names of these Americans who owned the self-directed pension plans became public this summer, when Danish authorities sued them, hoping to recover lost funds. Exactly how these people linked up with Solo Capital is unknown. Mr. Shah’s publicist would say only that they came via wealth management advisory firms.

There are demographic patterns. Most live on the East Coast, with clusters in New York, New Jersey and Florida. At least five different plans used the same mailing address, 425 West 23rd Street, Apartment 7B, New York, N.Y. The current tenant there had never heard of the Danish lawsuits, but said he had received mail for one of the defendants, Gavin Crescenzo, a previous occupant.

Nearly all the defendants have jobs in finance, though one, Michael Ben-Jacob, is a partner at a prestigious law firm, Arnold & Porter. He declined to discuss the case and a spokeswoman at the firm said it did not comment on litigation in progress.

Many people have their names attached to dozens of pension plans, which is why there are 277 suits and roughly 17 defendants. A 30-year-old named Roger Lehman, for instance, opened 44 plans in a handful of states, with names such as the Ludlow Holdings 401K Plan and the Hotel Fromance Pension Plan.

Mr. Shah said through his spokesman that Solo Capital worked with 200 of these pension plans. He declined to identify which ones.

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John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases — then suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.CreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times

None of the defendants responded to requests for comment. In July, though, an email response came instead, unbidden, from a law firm in Luxembourg called Schaffelhuber Müller & Kollegen. A partner there named Helene Schwiering stated that her clients, whom she did not name, would appreciate it “if you henceforth refrain from attempting to contact them.”

On paper, the owners of the plans pocketed most of SKAT’s $2 billion. In reality, these people probably wound up with little or none of the money.

That, at least, is the impression of John Hanamirian, a plaintiffs attorney in New Jersey. Until mid-July, he represented defendants in more than 50 cases, then he suddenly filed legal papers withdrawing from all but a few of them.

The withdrawal filings were revealing. They stated that Mr. Hanamirian was not paid by defendants named in the lawsuits. Rather, his bills were paid by what he described only as a “Luxembourg law firm.” And that law firm would not provide needed files about his defendants, “despite repeated requests,” he wrote.

In an interview, Mr. Hanamirian elaborated. The firm was the one in Luxembourg that sent that out-of-the-blue email asking that defendants in the cases be left alone.

“I needed documents surrounding their involvement, whatever that is — bank statements, investment statements, communications,” Mr. Hanamirian said. “The firm wouldn’t do it. They said, ‘We’ll meet you in advance, the day of the proceedings.’ I said that’s unacceptable.”

Before exiting the cases, Mr. Hanamirian spoke to a handful of clients who told him that money went in and then was immediately moved out of their accounts. Whether the defendants earned a fee of some kind is unknown to Mr. Hanamirian, as is the ultimate destination of the funds.

“I don’t want any of this to reflect on my former clients,” he said. “But the whole thing was definitely odd.”

$3 Million, Every Hour

In 2013, all that stood between Solo Capital and Denmark’s treasury was the bespectacled, gray-haired veteran of SKAT, Sven Nielsen. After two colleagues retired, he was the last person in the Dividend Department. Complicating matters, he lacked the tools to perform the most basic due diligence when reviewing refund applications.

The agency was in the midst of a yearslong and often disastrous overhaul, meant to digitize the system and reduce head count. The priority was helping Danish taxpayers, not foreign shareholders. Mr. Nielsen didn’t even have a database to check whether an individual pension plan actually owned the shares it claimed, said Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013.

“Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”

There was another problem that nobody knew about then: Mr. Nielsen could be persuaded to break the law. When the Danish police searched his home after the Solo Capital revelations, they found a letter showing that in 2007, he helped an old friend illegally secure $5.7 million from SKAT. (The two men knew each other from the days when Mr. Nielsen moonlighted with a job delivering newspapers.) Last December, prosecutors convicted Mr. Nielsen of fraud for taking a kickback, the equivalent of $315,000, for his efforts.

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A restaurant in downtown Copenhagen where Mr. Nielsen was said to have been taken.CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

Defenders of Mr. Nielsen maintain that he is a fundamentally decent guy who made a serious mistake under the suasion of a pal. True or not, Mr. Nielsen had a new pal in 2014, just as the SKAT payouts soared.

His name was Camilo Vargas. He worked in London at one of a small number of “payment agents,” niche companies that handle the array of paperwork submitted to foreign tax authorities for refunds. Mr. Vargas had just founded his own payment agent firm, which he called Syntax GIS. Soon after Syntax began operations, it started working with Sanjay Shah, who eventually bought the company.

During the first of several trips to Copenhagen, Mr. Vargas sought out Mr. Nielsen, asking for guidance on how to fill out Danish tax refund applications. What is known about those meetings comes from the one interview Mr. Nielsen has ever given, in a 2016 documentary that ran on DR, Denmark’s version of the BBC. Mr. Nielsen appeared to be flattered by the attention and happy to provide advice.

He just as gladly accepted invitations to dinner. Mr. Nielsen described in the interview a lively evening drinking beer with Mr. Vargas in a popular downtown area in Copenhagen.

“We walked down Stroget,” he said, referring to a famous pedestrian street, “and made several pit stops.”

The friendship was fantastically lucrative. In 2014, more than $590 million was paid on 1,500 refund applications. Danish authorities believe most of them came from Solo Capital clients. In the first seven months of 2015, the figures soared to roughly $1.2 billion, paid to more than 2,500 applications — about 16 applications every working day.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Nielsen that Camilo Vargas was playing him.

“At no point did I get the impression that he wanted to trick me or cheat in any way,” Mr. Nielsen said in the documentary, sounding bereft. “But that’s what it could appear like today.”

Mr. Vargas could not be located for comment. The producers at DR hired a researcher to find him, to no avail.

In the summer of 2015, the pace of applications made one final surge. In July alone, $500 million in refunds was disbursed — about $25 million per working day, $3 million every hour.

Mr. Shah may have had a hunch that the Danish tax refund machine was about to stop working. In May 2015, he met in London with his then-new compliance officer at Solo Capital, Navin Khokhrai. As Mr. Shah put it in the handwritten letter provided by his publicist, Mr. Khokhrai expressed profound reservations about Solo Capital’s business, telling his boss that he was unsure “whether the company was processing the trades correctly.” Mr. Shah assured him that he’d obtained all necessary legal clearances.

Mr. Khokhrai was apparently not convinced. He resigned soon after and Mr. Shah stated in the same handwritten letter that his former employee “submitted a whistle-blower letter to HMRC” — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — “alleging that Solo had created fictitious client accounts and trading records in order to defraud the tax authorities in Denmark and Belgium.”

In August 2015, the dividends stopped flowing out of SKAT, though not because of sirens set off by anyone inside the agency. Rather, it took a tip from the British government to end the scheme, several Danish politicians said. The London offices of Solo Capital were later raided by Britain’s National Crime Agency and by July 2016 Solo Capital closed.

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Lisbeth Romer, who was Mr. Nielsen’s boss until she retired in 2013. “Sven’s job was reduced to bookkeeping, essentially, checking if a form was filled out properly,” she said. “A monkey could do it.”CreditCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times

At the time, Mr. Shah said he had done nothing improper. “Had they accused a large bank like Goldman Sachs the bank would have kicked back with a large team of lawyers,” he told Borsen, a Danish newspaper. “It’s easier to target a single individual.”

‘This Was Fraud’

Danish authorities have been trying to unravel Mr. Shah’s handiwork for over three years. Much of his modus operandi was revealed, experts believe, in 2017 when police in Germany, who were acting at the behest of the Danes, used a search warrant to sift through the records of North Channel Bank, a small bank in Mainz, a city outside Frankfurt. A team of 60 investigators found that the bank was used by 27 of the American pension plans, which were ultimately paid a total of about $168 million by SKAT.

What investigators found is that the accounts didn’t actually own any shares of Danish companies, said Prof. Christoph Spengel, who served as an adviser to Germany’s Parliament during an inquiry into the questionable trades. He studied the results of the North Channel investigation, issued in a report by a German district attorney. He said that the 27 plans primarily traded with one another. One would place an order to short a chunk of shares of Danish stock — essentially, a promise to buy the shares once they dipped below a certain price.

Soon after, an order was placed by another of the 27 plans to buy the order for the shorted shares. That open buy order — essentially, a promise to purchase shares that the other plan still didn’t own — was proof enough for SKAT to approve a refund. Once the refund was issued, the buy order was canceled.

“This wasn’t a transaction, this wasn’t tax planning,” Professor Spengel said. “This was fraud.”

A spokeswoman for North Channel said the bank was cooperating with the authorities and had no comment.

After funds were wired to North Bank, Professor Spengel said, they were shunted to two banks, first in London, then another in Germany. Finally, he said, they were sent to accounts controlled by Mr. Shah and his wife, Usha.

Jack Irvine, Mr. Shah’s spokesman, said none of this was true.

“Neither Solo nor Sanjay have had anything to do with North Channel Bank,” he wrote in an email, “so there appears to be confusion, which is not unusual in this case.”

There has been outrage in Denmark over the SKAT scandal but so far the repercussions have been surprisingly limited. No ministers have been fired. The director of SKAT was laid off in August 2016, though Mr. Shah’s machinations were among several causes. A new investigation into the cum-ex disaster was ordered by the justice minister in February, which could last years. For now, politicians here seem to emphasize pragmatism over finger-pointing.

“In the past, governments have fallen because of investigations like this,” said Jesper Petersen, a member of the opposition Social Democratic Party. “But we have yet to find any minister who saw evidence of this problem and ignored it.”

Sanjay Shah is preoccupied with his own troubles. In mid-September, a High Court of Justice judge in London entered a $1.3 billion default judgment against Solo Capital and a company it owned, Elysium Global, in a case filed by SKAT alleging fraud. Mr. Shah’s spokesman said his client didn’t respond to the lawsuit because both companies are now controlled by liquidators.

He also said that at the prodding of Danish officials, Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates have all frozen, though not confiscated, $660 million in assets belonging to Mr. Shah. The financial pinch is enough that Mr. Shah has been forced to put his house up for sale, the publicist added. Out of caution, the publicist said, Mr. Shah does not travel.

Fears of arrest and extradition are justified, said Henning Sorensen, an associate law professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

“Shah is free as long as he stays in Dubai,” he said. “He is like a bird living in a golden cage.”

Alain Delaquérière and Martin Selsoe Sorensen contributed reporting.

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/business/denmark-skat-tax-scandal.html |

Nature Where in the World Is Denmark’s $2 Billion?, in 2018-10-05 17:45:18