The VAT treatment of the issue, acquisition, holding and sale of shares has become a rather complicated affair over the last thirty years. The case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on this topic is fundamentally ambiguous, causing serious legal uncertainty among businesses [1]. In its judgment in C&D Foods…

A subsidiary can (also) be a fixed establishment (FE) of its parent company under European (EU) VAT, after all. This is the most immediate conclusion as it emerges from the much-awaited decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Dong Yang Electronics (Case C-547/18). With its ruling on 7 May 2020,…

Many States have incorporated General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAARs) into their tax laws to prevent tax avoidance; within the EU, a GAAR is even mandatory for corporate taxation since 1 January 2019 (Article 6 of the EU Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive (EU ATAD)). States are recommended in the OECD Model Tax Convention on Income and Capital to…

Online platforms are an important part of the digital economy and one of the key enablers of the tremendous growth of the e-commerce sector. According to data published by Ecommerce Europe, business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce turnover in Europe is worth over EUR 621 billion and continues to grow at around 13%.[1] This is quite fast considering…

It may well be said that George and Ira Gershwin’s simple and unforgettable line, “Let’s call the whole thing off!”, sums up the European Commission’s (“Commission”) view that the “wholly artificial arrangement” limitation in Cadbury Schweppes (C-196/04) does not apply to the CFC rule in Art 7(2)(b) of the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive (“ATAD”). It is…

The Change of Scenery On 1 December 2019, the von der Leyen Commission took over for the coming 5 years, and it is called to deliver on a most challenging mandate. The European identity is questioned more than ever before, with Brexit being just one of the several signs. The established structures of the EU…

Two cases, currently before different courts highlight long-standing questions around the attribution of profits to permanent establishments. Irish and United Kingdom law on the attribution of profits to branches of non-resident companies remined identical for decades until 2003. In each country, a non-resident company trading through a branch in that country was chargeable to corporation…

May linking rules related to hybrid financial instruments be incompatible with the EU Fundamental freedoms? And with Article 24 (4) OECD MC? What about treaty override? It is no secret that hybrid financial instruments (HFIs) serve actual business and legal purposes by allowing investors and issuers to better meet their economic and legal needs from…

On 14 November 2019, AG Kokott released her opinion in Dong Yang Electronics (Case C-547/18), referred to the Court of Justice of European Union (CJEU) by the Regional Administrative Court of Wroclaw (Poland) and concerning the existence of a VAT fixed establishment (FE) of a third-country (Korea) company in an EU Member State (Poland). As AG…

In June 2017, the European Commission published its proposal on transparency rules for tax planning by intermediaries and certain taxpayers (the Commission proposal). The Commission proposal was amended multiple times, before it was formally adopted as Directive 2018/822 (DAC6) on 25 May 2018. DAC6 requires Member States to put in place, by 31 December 2019,…

The past few years have seen the sensational rise of new models of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, which have been synthetically captured under the umbrella definition of “sharing economy”. The ascent of digital platforms – including renowned companies headquartered in the Silicon Valley like Airbnb and Uber, or the French unicorns…

Not the Hungarian Constitutional Court but maybe AG Kokott in her forthcoming opinion in the Google Ireland case… Optimistically speaking, the Hungarian Advertisement Tax contributes to a large extent to the enrichment of jurisprudence both in the field of EU law and the law of double tax treaties, as it features a host of discriminatory,…

Introduction The new European Commission that is taking shape shall inherit quite a heavy file of initiatives to pursue in the next five years. Certainly, this is the case in the area of taxation. Some of these proposals are on the waiting list for years. For example, the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) was…