With its ruling dated 11 March 2019 (case no. 2C_34/2018) the Swiss Federal Supreme Court upheld a decision of the Court of Justice of the Canton Geneva, according to which it was principally possible for a Swiss holding company to undertake a tax-neutral demerger, such that the existing holding company could transfer just one qualifying…
The High Court of Kenya gave judgement on 15 March 2019 on a challenge to the validity of the Kenyan-Mauritius double tax treaty in Tax Justice Network- Africa v Kenya Revenue Authority and others. The petitioners had sought a declaration that the treaty had not been subjected to the ratification of domestic law and the…
We are glad to announce that the editorial team of the Kluwer Tax Law Blog has been strengthened with the appointment of Dr. Vikram Chand (Tax Policy Center, University of Lausanne, Switzerland) as the Managing Editor of the Blog. Dr. Chand currently has a strong interest in International Tax Policy, Transfer Pricing, Tax Treaty and…
According to an oft-cited research by the UN University World Institute for Development Economics Research, India loses over 40 billion US dollars in revenue, annually, to corporate tax avoidance. Obviously, for a country like India, the money could have been used to reduce poverty-related deaths and to provide basic social care to the poor and…
The proposal for upholding a minimum effective tax rate on corporate profits, on which the OECD Inclusive Framework recently invited comments, has received a lot of criticism. A minimum tax would deny developing countries the possibility to compensate for a poor investment climate by offering tax breaks, harming their development. Worse, it would undermine the…
We are happy to inform you that the latest issue of the journal is now available and includes the following contributions: Han Kogels, The Energy Transition and Fiscal Policy The aim of the Paris Agreement of 4 November 2016, meanwhile ratified by 184 countries, is to strengthen the global response to the threat of…
The text represents the personal views of the author, which do not purport to represent the view of Poland’s Ministry of Finance. In the judgement in X GmbH (Case C-135/17), on 26 February 2019, the CJEU for the first time examined a compatibility of CFC rules with the EU primary law to the extent of…
Groundbreaking decision, landmark case, a milestone in EU case law, disappointing surprise: there are different ways to refer to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) judgments issued on February 26, 2019, on the withholding tax exemption provided by the Interest and Royalties Directive (joined cases C-115/16, C-118/16, C-119/16 and C-299/16, available here – the ‘IRD…
I am happy to inform you that the third issue of 2019 is available and includes, among others, the following contributions: An editorial by Edoardo Traversa, entitled “Ongoing Tax Reforms at the EU Level: Why Trust Matters”, where the author discusses the lack of trust between EU tax administrations, the very slow progress in the…
The text represents the personal views of the author, which do not purport to represent the view of Poland’s Ministry of Finance. In the judgement in X GmbH (Case C-135/17), on 26 February 2019, the CJEU for the first time examined a compatibility of CFC rules with the EU primary law to the extent of…
The recent (February 2019) OECD document for public consultation introduced two proposals to address the challenges of taxation, the first one is the revised profit allocation and nexus rules in the digital economy (Section 2) and the second one is the global anti-base erosion proposal (Section 3). Even though the document is titled challenges of…
The text represents the personal views of the author, which do not purport to represent the view of Poland’s Ministry of Finance. In the judgement in X GmbH (Case C-135/17), on 26 February 2019, the CJEU for the first time examined a compatibility of CFC rules with the EU primary law to the extent of…
In a little more than one week we saw a series of judgments and a European Commission decision that may again test the limits of the European Union’s state aid system in its application to matters of direct taxation. On March 7, 2019 the Commission started a formal state aid investigation into the tax deduction…
Jonathan Schwarz has already briefly discussed the CJEU’s judgment in the “Danish Beneficial Ownership Cases” (C-115/16, C-118/16, C-119/16, C-299/16 and C-116/16 and C-117/16), noting that the cases “represent a landmark on beneficial ownership” and comparing them to recent international tax law jurisprudence, concluding that the “voyage of discovery is certainly not at and end”. In…
