Interpol has added New Zealand citizen Paul Mora to its list of most wanted criminals, after German authorities issued an international arrest warrant over the former London banker’s alleged involvement in a multimillion euro tax fraud scheme.
Mora, 53, is one of six people charged in 2017 by Frankfurt prosecutors over the “cum-ex” scandal, a complex derivatives juggling act that siphoned taxpayer’s money from German state coffers, causing estimated damages of more than €113m.
Described by one prosecutor as “the greatest tax robbery in German history”, the scheme involved trading shares at high speed on or just before the dividend record date – the day the company checks its records to identify shareholders – and then claiming two or more refunds for capital gains tax which had in fact only been paid to the state once.
Two British bankers who worked on Mora’s team first at HypoVereinsbank and later his own investment vehicles Ballance Capital and Arunvill were handed suspended jail terms and one a €14m fine for tax evasion by a court in Bonn last year.
At the start of January, a regional court in Wiesbaden ruled that Mora, a former employee of investment bank Merill Lynch, should stand trial in Germany.
“Mora is suspected of having played a decisive role in the development and planning of cum-ex deals,” according to a poster by Germany’s federal police poster to be displayed at international airports. “He is presumed to be staying abroad.”
While Germany and New Zealand do not have an extradition treaty, Interpol’s red notice arrest warrant will in effect stop Mora’s ability to travel outside his home country.
Mora has said he reserves his full rights to remain in New Zealand, with his lawyers telling Bloomberg in a statement: “He is not a ‘fugitive’ and these public steps are therefore wholly unnecessary.” He has told New Zealand media that all his trades were “approved by legal experts and undertaken in accordance with advice”.
Born in New Plymouth, Mora had a background in tax law before moving into investment banking in the City of London, where former colleagues recall his penchant for rugby and Hawaiian shirts.
He is understood to have invested in property in Christchurch, where he in 2014 purchased the 17-storey Forsyth Barr building that was badly damaged in the earthquake two years later.
In London, Mora was until 2015 listed as director of the Cinnamon Club, an Indian restaurant located in a Grade II-listed Victorian building next to the Department for Education and popular with politicians and business people. According to German newspaper Die Zeit, the restaurant was where cum-ex deals were contrived and later celebrated, with one insider referring to it as the “cum-ex lounge”.
Mora’s current whereabouts are unclear.