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…
Two cases, currently before different courts highlight long-standing questions around the attribution of profits to permanent establishments. Irish and United Kingdom law on the attribution of profits to branches of non-resident companies remined identical for decades until 2003. In each country, a non-resident company trading through a branch in that country was chargeable to corporation…
In 2017, Brazil sent a formal request to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (“OECD”) to become one of its members. It seems that this decision — made by the economic team of former president Michel Temer — was not preceded by relevant discussions with areas potentially impacted by the occasional accession of the…
We are happy to inform you that the latest issue of the journal is now available. It is a special issue on transfer pricing in the digital economy. It combines academics and practitioners’ analysis on recent developments, so that the reader gets the broad picture on some of the most complex issues related to the…
Our 14-page comments and recommendations of 14 tax professionals and academics from 11 countries raise additional issues and concerns, and propose additional recommendations to undertake a detailed cost benefit analysis of the existing BEPS Actions prior to taking such drastic measures. Our 14 pages of comments and an appendix are available here on SSRN. We…
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…
On 14 November 2019, AG Kokott released her opinion in Dong Yang Electronics (Case C-547/18), referred to the Court of Justice of European Union (CJEU) by the Regional Administrative Court of Wroclaw (Poland) and concerning the existence of a VAT fixed establishment (FE) of a third-country (Korea) company in an EU Member State (Poland). As AG…
In June 2017, the European Commission published its proposal on transparency rules for tax planning by intermediaries and certain taxpayers (the Commission proposal). The Commission proposal was amended multiple times, before it was formally adopted as Directive 2018/822 (DAC6) on 25 May 2018. DAC6 requires Member States to put in place, by 31 December 2019,…
We applaud the OECD’s 15–year effort since its 2005 publication of E-commerce: Transfer Pricing and Business Profits Taxation to address the challenges arising from the digitalization of multinational enterprises’ business models and the evolution of cross-border ecommerce. We support the 6 November 2019 comments of Dr. Lorraine Eden, our colleague, and Dr. Oliver Treidler, that…
Equality is one of the core values of modern democratic societies. It is no accident that equality featured in opening preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the first article of both the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights…
The digital economy is faced with major challenges for the international tax system since the traditional tax rules seem to be insufficiently well designed to govern new ways of conducting businesses and unsuitable for accurately detecting and allocating the value created from digitalised business models.[1] This situation has triggered a political and academic discussion about…
The past few years have seen the sensational rise of new models of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, which have been synthetically captured under the umbrella definition of “sharing economy”. The ascent of digital platforms – including renowned companies headquartered in the Silicon Valley like Airbnb and Uber, or the French unicorns…
The speed at which the world around us is changing combined with the novelty of the challenges our societies are faced with, seems to lead our policy makers towards what can be described as panic driven decisions. At this point in time we can with some ease point towards the on-going developments regarding variants of…
The Rwandan Income Tax Act (Law nº 016/2018 of 13/04/2018) gazetted on April 16, 2018 overhauled the Rwandan income tax system with various significant changes. One of the changes introduced by the Rwandan Income Tax Act that gave rise to wide discussion among tax practitioners relates to non-deductible expenses—particularly the restriction imposed on the deductibility…
