Introduction Except for the unprecedented health crisis, the COVID-19 spread has generated the biggest economic and financial shock of the century across markets and cross-borders.[1] The preventive and reactive mechanisms developed by national governments and international and supranational organizations to respond to the crisis give in turn rise to a plethora of tax questions. It…

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…

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…

The Debate What makes a tax system competitive? How can countries multiply the competitiveness of the existing system? These question-marks are attracting substantial research by today’s policy makers, at national and international level as well as by business lobbyists. Most importantly, their potential replies entail significant impact for taxpayers and the society in general. Indicatively,…

For thousands of years the human species was constrained to limit its activities and creativity in the planetary space. Today, the Digital Revolution has opened a new space: the cyber-space, removing the limits once and for all. Cyber-space is understood as a virtual world, a notional environment existing in and due to the network of…

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…

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…

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…

The first semester of 2018 has witnessed notable – if not unprecedented – activity in the area of tax policy, in the EU as well as internationally. The wind of change tha we sense in international taxation the last decade is evidently becoming stronger and stronger, while its direction remains largely undefined. The CFE Tax…

The first common EU list of non cooperative tax jurisdictions – commonly referred as the EU black list – was released on 05 December 2017. It included seventeen offshore countries: American Samoa, Bahrain, Barbados, Grenada, Guam, South Korea, Macao SAR, Marshall Islands, Mongolia, Namibia, Palau, Panama, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia and United…

A Directive on Tax Dispute Resolution was adopted by European Member States early in October 2017. It had been proposed by the European Commission 1 year ago as part of the Corporate Tax Reform Package, along with the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) and the amendment of the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive (ATAD) regarding hybrid…

The Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs of the European Parliament recently finalized the amendments to the existing Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD). This decision was based on the related proposal of the European Commission, submitted in July 2016.EU initiatives in this direction – including adoption…

In March 2017, the OECD and the IMF published a report on tax uncertainty (Report) confirming that such uncertainty exists and impacts on business and investment. Similar was the outcome of an earlier survey one year ago by the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation: Measuring Corporation Tax Uncertainty Across Countries. The issue is of…

On 16 February 2017 the Public Consultation on the proposed introduction of rules at EU level to disincentivize promotion of aggressive tax planning schemes was closed. The rules under consideration focus on a Mandatory Disclosure Regime (MDR) – referred to also as a Disclosure of Tax Avoidance Schemes (DOTAS) regime. Under such rules, tax advisers…