The whistleblower who exposed a massive tax scam
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We hear from a man who was once a high-earning, high flyer in the finance industry. But, after he blew the whistle on a major financial scandal, he found himself unemployable and being sued for every cent he owned. Jas Bains tells us his story.
If you'd like to get in touch with the team, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Producer/presenter: Theo Leggett
Business Daily is the home of in-depth audio journalism devoted to the world of money and work. From small startup stories to big corporate takeovers, global economic shifts to trends in technology, we look at the key figures, ideas and events shaping business.
Each episode is a 17-minute, daily deep dive into a single topic, featuring expert analysis and the people at the heart of the story.
Recent episodes explore the weight-loss drug revolution, the growth in AI, the cost of living, the economic impact of the war in the Middle East, and why bond markets are so powerful.
We also feature in-depth interviews with company founders and some of the world's most prominent CEOs. These include Google's Sundar Pichai, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and the CEO of Canva, Melanie Perkins.
(Photo: Jas Bains at the height of his career. Credit: Jas Bains)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:08.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Theo Leggart. |
| 0:11.8 | In today's program, we'll meet a man who blew the whistle on a 1.8 billion euro tax scam |
| 0:17.1 | that ended up paying a very heavy price. |
| 0:20.4 | Jazz Baines was once a high flyer in London's financial industry, who knew what it was like |
| 0:25.7 | to indulge in Wolf of Wall Street's style excess. |
| 0:29.1 | We'd be met in Dubai by a 20-foot limousine to take us to a very nice five or even six-star hotel. |
| 0:36.0 | On one of the Singapore Grand Prix weekends. There was a big party at |
| 0:39.8 | the Crudita on top of the Bay Sands Marina Hotel. And yes, the bill ran into six figures. |
| 0:45.0 | But when he realised his former boss was making a fortune at the expense of European taxpayers, |
| 0:50.7 | he says he felt he had no option but to intervene. I knew how it was going to end up. If you're going to do tax trades into tens of millions, |
| 0:58.3 | people will get upset. Hundreds of millions, it's going to be a political matter. |
| 1:03.2 | Going to a billion, you've attacked a nation. |
| 1:05.2 | That decision cost him his livelihood and left him on the wrong end of a major lawsuit. |
| 1:12.4 | Listen on to hear his story. |
| 1:20.6 | So let me introduce you to Jas Baines, the man who found himself at the center of a legal and financial hurricane. He's mild-mannered, late 40s, quietly spoken and neat. It's easy to imagine him as a corporate lawyer |
| 1:29.5 | making very good money from crunching complicated numbers. And to begin with, that's exactly what he was. |
| 1:36.5 | Well, I started my career in year 2000 as a lawyer in a very major law firm based in central London, |
| 1:44.0 | worked there for a few years |
| 1:45.7 | and then moved into investment banking. And then one day, 2010, I got a call from Sanjay Shah's |
| 1:53.1 | immediate deputy and he said, look, we'd like to hire somebody new to help us build an office. |
| 1:58.5 | I was intrigued enough to go along and I met Sanjay Shah over a drink |
... |
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