EU/EEA
On January 15, 2016, in a joint (bi-partisan) letter of Senate Finance Committee Republicans and Democrats to US Treasury, one that will certainly be of interest to our friends at Wolters Kluwer (a Netherlands parent multinational enterprise), the Senate Finance Committee members encouraged Treasury to use a tit-for-tat strategy against the EU Commission. The letter stated that…
The raison d’être of corporate taxation relates to the aim of achieving an impartial treatment of different legal forms in order to safeguard a level playing field for conducting business. In the EU this aim must be contemplated in conjunction with the objective of establishing an internal market free of fiscal barriers. The present post…
Written by Associate Professor, PhD, Michael Tell, Department of Law, Copenhagen Business School and Technical Advisor, CORIT Advisory. Darwin’s theory of evolution states that complex creatures evolve from more simplistic ancestors, while natural selection ensures that only the fittest survive and the others become evolutionary “dead-ends”. The aim of this blog contribution is to address…
Introduction It has been a few weeks now since the Commission has made public its decisions in the FIAT and Starbucks cases. I understand that the Commission, the countries involved and the taxpayers are now going through the decisions themselves, agreeing on what information is too confidential to be published, before the actual – blacked…
The 1999 Simmons & Simmons report on administrative practices is now public, together with the responses by Member States. My suspicion was correct: France had reason to keep the documents a secret. Let me explain. On 22 April, 2015, I published on this a site a blog titled: “A mysterious study in the Code of…
According to EU law the prevailing divergences between the national tax systems shall not be corrected by unilateral measures that grant fiscal advantages to firms, which are affected by the disparities between tax systems[1]. Equally, the corrections implemented unilaterally that mean to neutralise the disparities between tax systems shall be aligned with the logic of…
Today the European Commission released its first set of decisions on corporate tax rulings, which it has investigated for over a year. Starbucks Manufacturing EMEA and Fiat Finance and Trade were the first test cases where final decisions have been issued. At this point in time, only press releases are available. Formal decisions will be…
The scope of the present article will be narrow. The aim is to point out a misinterpretation of the Cadbury ruling, which might have caused a flawed theory of the compatibility of certain CFC regimes with EU law. I do not use the appellative “flawed” to sound overconfident, but because in my view, good law…
As a woman, I naturally think that women are wonderful creatures. We are sociable, charming, caring and (almost) always the radiant center of attention. But unfortunately we are accused of having a number of negative traits: apparently we give off conflicting signals, are unable to make decisions and keep raking up the past. In my…
The establishment of a link between the financial interests of the Union and the general budget of the Union is the reason why the domestic penalties made applicable in matters of VAT fraud are covered by Union law. On 8 September 2015 the Court of Justice of the EU (“CJEU”) issued its ruling in Taricco,…
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…
This is another lone voice cry in the wilderness – I am getting used to that. By 9 September 2015, anyone who has an opinion about further corporate tax transparency in Europe, are invited to file it (or forever hold their peace?). Those opinions must not be filed with DG-Taxud, but the EU General Directorate…
The case brings about the opportunity to fill a gap in the Norwegian tax law. In order to determine the fiscal residence of a corporation, the current formula stipulated by art. 2(2) Tax Act uses the notion of ‘belonging to the jurisdiction’, while the OECD model employs the term ‘place of effective management’[1] as a…
On 17 June 2015, the Commission adopted a plan to relaunch the 3CTB (Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base), a common system for calculating the tax base of businesses operating in the EU. Except, it did not, it announced that it would start with a modified 2CTB (Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base) instead. ************** BEPS is…
