On June 7, 2017, India joined more than 65 countries in signing the OECD’s Multilateral Instrument to implement tax treaty-related base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) recommendations. The Instrument – developed under Action 15 of the BEPS project – seeks to transpose BEPS recommendations into over a thousand tax treaties in a “synchronized and efficient…

Consider this. Formula One World Championship Limited UK (Formula One) entered into a Race Promotion Contract (RPC) with Jaypee Sports International Limited (Jaypee), an Indian entity, under which Jaypee was granted the right to host, stage, and promote a motor racing event in India. Buddh International Racing Circuit located in the Indian state of Uttar…

Foreign enterprises for the purpose of Indian Income Tax (IT) Act are enterprises that are incorporated outside India or that do not have their place of effective management in India (as per new section 6 of IT Act, effective from April 2017). Section 5(2) read with section 4 of the IT Act provides that the…

On February 1, 2017, India’s Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, presented the country’s 2017-18 Budget, which contains several tax proposals in the area of international tax law, including the introduction of a new provision to provide for transfer pricing secondary adjustments and new thin capitalization rules. The Budget also contains much-needed clarity on the tax treatment…

India has entered into more than 100 double tax avoidance agreements with foreign nations. Almost all these tax treaties contain an article on Mutual Agreement Procedure (MAP) setting out how India and its treaty partners would resolve, at the instance of the taxpayer, disputes that lead to “taxation not in accordance with the treaty.” International…

In a decision that offers the much-needed certainty in the tax treatment of income arising from the cross-border transfer of rights in intangibles used by Indian subsidiaries of multinational corporations, India’s Delhi High Court recently ruled that income arising from the transfer of foreign-owned intangible assets between two non-resident companies cannot be subject to Indian…

On May 10, 2016, the Indian Finance Ministry announced that a new protocol has been finalized to amend certain provisions of the Indo-Mauritius double taxation avoidance agreement. According to a press release issued by the Finance Ministry, the protocol is aimed at tackling the dual problem of treaty shopping and round tripping of funds, besides…

On April 12, 2016, India’s High Court at Madras delivered a landmark ruling in favor of an anti-avoidance provision (section 94A) introduced in the Indian Income Act, in 2011, to enable the Government to notify for tax purposes foreign tax jurisdictions that do not share tax and other financial information with the tax authority. From…

The Indian Ministry of Finance released last month draft guidance on applying the “place of effective management” (POEM) test to determine tax residence of companies. The guidance came almost eight months after the Government substituted, through the 2015 Finance Act, the existing “control and management” test with the universal concept of POEM in Section 6(3)…