The relationship between treaties and domestic tax law ought to be straightforward. The pacta servanda sunt principle expressed in articles 26 and 27 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties itself implies that treaty obligations must be upheld notwithstanding domestic law. A variety of constitutional arrangements around the world mean that there is…

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…

Commissioner of Taxation v Resource Capital Fund IV LP [2019] FCAFC 51 addressed a number of fundamental international tax issues. The case concerned a gain from the sale of shares in an Australian incorporated public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange by two Cayman Island limited partnerships whose partners included residents of the United…

Limited Liability Companies have become one of the most common forms of business organisation in the United States. Their main attraction is a combination of limited liability for LLC members and structural flexibility that can be adapted to almost any business requirement. US federal income tax seeks to eliminate double taxation of profits in the…

As a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (“OECD”) Mexico[1] has been actively involved in the design and development of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project and began implementing many of the recommended actions in 2014, even before the final BEPS reports were finalized in 2015. The execution and implementation…

Tax treaty negotiators in 100 countries will be tied up over the next few months with the challenge to evaluate their positions on the BEPS Multilateral Convention (BEPS Convention) with a view to participation in the signing ceremony scheduled for 7 June 2017 in Paris. The many options offered by the BEPS Convention make it…

Publication of text of The Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS Convention) by the OECD on 24 November 2016 is one of the key milestones in the OECD/G20 Project to tackle Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. The BEPS Convention will be open for signature from…

Tax practitioner’s in the northern hemisphere taking their summer holidays may well have included the OECD discussion draft of 5 July 2016 on the attribution of profits to permanent establishments as part of their holiday reading (a mere 40 pages). See post on July 21, 2016. Over 50 organisations and individuals submitted comments(published by the…

In many European countries, the question of legal personality has relevance for determining the transparent character of a business entity for tax purposes and this assessment is even more complex when the entity has been established under foreign law. On the other side, in the United States, any business entity can acquire status of corporation…

In a recent post, Professor Werner Haslehner raised an interesting discussion on the new wording of Article 4.1 (a) of the Parent-Subsidiary Directive (“PSD”), which obliges the Member State of the parent company to tax the dividends received to the extent that the corresponding payment are deductible from the corporate income tax paid by the…

In many respects a multilateral tax treaty represents an utopian view of international tax law: a wide consensus among nation states to submit themselves to a common set of rules that govern the levying of taxes across national boundaries. While there have been several examples of attempts at multilateral double taxation treaties, such as the…

This week, the United Kingdom Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, has ruled that a UK resident individual member of a Delaware limited liability company is entitled to credit in the UK for US tax on the profits of the LLC. Anson v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2015] UKSC 44 has rejected…