Intertax issue 12 is available and I am delighted to share with the reader the topics dealt with in the issue. In my editorial, “Taxes and Competiveness: How Much Competitive Is European Tax Competition?”, I critically address some of the topics discussed on the Platform for Tax Good Governance at its meeting after the summer…
On 30 August 2018 the OECD released the fourth round of BEPS Action 14 peer review reports on improving tax dispute resolution mechanisms. Included in this round was a report on Australia. The report concluded that Australia meets part of the elements of the Action 14, and in particular meets some of the requirements regarding…
I am delighted to share the contents of Intertax issue 11 with our readers. My editorial entitled “Profit Splitting and the Aspirational Arm’s Length Principle” discusses the (in)adequacy of the arm’s length principle, mainly or almost exclusively based on comparable transactions among unrelated parties, in cases where comparable transactions do not exist, in order to…
Following three years of investigation, McDonald’s has been cleared from the charge that it received fiscal state aid from Luxembourg, by virtue of the European Commission’s concluding decision of 19 September 2018. Thus, the Commission seems to have closed one of the various fronts opened in the fiscal state aid area in the last five…
VAT is a broad-based tax on final consumption by households. Even if, due to the invoice-credit mechanism through which the tax is normally levied, only final consumption is ultimately targeted, VAT uses each transaction taking place at every stage of the production and distribution process as taxing points. Depending on how a transaction is classified,…
By now, warranty & indemnity (W&I) insurance is more or less a transaction solution commodity. As such, it clearly has entered its next product life-cycle phase. Expectations are that stand-alone tax insurance will quickly follow suit. As W&I insurance has grown in popularity, tax insurance has been most often used as an add-on to W&I insurance to provide…
Almost every foreign client I have advised has at some stage told me how complex the Indian Income Tax Act is. And those who follow Indian tax jurisprudence closely know that judicial decisions, in many cases, are doubly complex. Recently, India’s Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT), New Delhi was asked to decide if the tax…
If the BEPS Project is considered formally concluded with the signature of the Multilateral Instrument, the war against base erosion and aggressive tax planning is still ongoing, with many battles remaining to be won. In this context, each and every transaction that can potentially serve aggressive tax planning is key target for policy-makers at the…
It is common to face resistance in MAP application, which is essentially based on misconception of Double Taxation Conventions (DTCs). As Article 9(1) establishes the arm’s length standard, which presents a range of possible prices, that misunderstanding may imply more economic double taxation. Given the Brazilian position on recent transfer pricing changes, these problems become…
Since the OECD started conceiving and implementing the BEPS project, the major argumentation in favour of the new policies is mainly based on the refrain that everybody should pay their “fair share” of taxes. It is hard to find any publicly available explanation about what exactly lies behind the idea of a “fair share” of…
One of the fascinating features of EU law is that no matter how well-established its classics may be, they are revisited over and over again. If you thought you had seen it all about preliminary references, think twice. Always think twice, because you can never be fully sure until the Court’s next judgment. Last week,…
Taxation of the digital economy remains fixed in the first position of the international tax charts, with the discussions focusing lately on the so-called Amazon tax considered to be introduced in the UK. The debate has been exalted following respective recent statement by the UK Finance Minister P. Hammond, stressing that the “country needs a…
Introduction Recently captive insurance arrangements have been scrutinized all over the world by tax authorities as they are believed to be vehicles that encourage profit shifting. The OECD, in the BEPS Action Plan, had considered captive insurance arrangements as a major area of concern. In fact, in the recently released 2018 OECD discussion draft on…
The Tax Court of Canada decision in Alta Energy Luxembourg S.A.R.L. v. The Queen, 2018 TCC 152 (CanLII) on August 22, 2018 may provide useful pointers to the meaning and application of the PPT found in Article 7(1) of the MLI and Article 29(9). A Luxembourg resident company claimed exemption from Canadian income tax under…
