COPENHAGEN (Reuters) -Danish prosecutors said on Thursday they had charged two British nationals with unlawfully obtaining more than 9 billion Danish crowns ($1.5 billion) via a sham trading scheme to make double tax reclaims.
The fraud scheme, known as ‘cum-ex’ trading, involved submitting more than 3,000 applications to the Danish Treasury on behalf of investors and companies from several countries around the world in order to receive dividend tax refunds, the prosecutor said.
“This is a case of extremely serious and extraordinarily extensive crime committed against the Danish state, and we believe that the two defendants committed cynical and meticulously planned fraud in a scheme where they defrauded the Danish state of 9 billion crowns,” state prosecutor Per Fiig said in a statement.
One of the charged resides in Dubai and the other in the United Kingdom, the prosecutor said.
The prosecutor has investigated the case, in which the Danish state was defrauded of more than 12,7 billion crowns, since 2016 in cooperation with counterparties in Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom.
The prosecutor has already seized more than 3 billion crowns from various persons and companies.
In March last year, two British bankers were handed suspended jail terms and a large penalty in Germany’s biggest post-war fraud trial of a scam involving large trades to get bogus tax reclaims.
($1 = 6.0484 Danish crowns)
(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Nikolaj Skydsgaard; Editing by Mark Potter and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
