Back in April this year, my contribution on the Panama Papers scandal started by saying that: “Massive leaks of information on offshore activity like the Panama Papers illustrate the need for enhanced global tax cooperation with an improved and deeper inter-jurisdictional information sharing scheme.”[1] It is not now my intention to follow the subsequent episodes…
Introduction While tax legislation is subject to continuous changes, tax treaties are an interesting tool whereby Contracting States offer investors some degree of legal certainty, especially where there is a recognition that internal law should not override tax treaties’ provisions. Article 2(4) of OECD-MA can be seen as a provision intended to assure the continuity…
Harmonisation of the efforts to discourage tax avoidance in the EU Recently, besides the objective of maintaining a balanced allocation1 (a reflection of the principle of territoriality), the imperative of restoring trust in the fairness of tax systems has been gaining terrain as a possible justification for restrictions of free movement rights2. The Member States…
The attribution of profits to a permanent establishment is already a complex issue with at least three separate regimes in the tax treaty context- the OECD Authorised Approach under the 2010 OECD version of Article 7 of the OECD Model, the AOA subject to limitations required by the pre-2010 version and that permitted by Article…
On June 24 the British people voted in favour of the UK leaving the EU. The vote itself does not automatically imply the withdrawal from the EU: indeed, such withdrawal shall take place pursuant to Article 50 of the EU Treaty, which requires in the first place the notification of the intention to leave the…
“I know there’s a proverb which that says ‘To err is human,’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.” – Agatha Christie, Hallowe’en Party The now Have you ever wondered how technology can change the future of solving tax questions, or wondered if it would even be possible…
Corporate Social Responsibility (“CSR”) has become one of the top priorities on the Agenda of almost all supranational bodies (OECD, EU, UN) and many jurisdictions. Due to the overall lack of revenues by Countries and the innumerable tax-related leaks (Luxleaks, Panama papers, etc.) along with the recent and ongoing changes within the worldwide international tax…
On June 27, 2016 the EU Commission published the long awaited Starbucks State Aid decision (see here). The EU Commission’s decision challenges the outcome of the Advanced Pricing Agreement (APA) between the Netherlands Tax Authority (Tax Authority) and Starbucks Manufacturing BV (SMBV), a wholly owned and controlled coffee roasting operation. Below is the Part I…
Is tax avoidance a bad thing? The international tax community seems recently to adopt an almost unanimous position: Yes, it is supposedly a very bad thing, as it not only reduces public revenue, but also makes taxation “less fair”, since tax-avoiding taxpayers do not pay their “fair share”. It is surprising how unanimous is this…
Probably without noticing it, Colombia did not take into account that signing the recent DTT with France would allow some treaty-covered taxpayers to claim Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) protection. Some of Colombia’s DTTs, as the ones signed with Spain, Chile, Switzerland, Portugal and Mexico, include Most-Favoured-Nation clauses with respect to royalties. In this sense, it is important…
“Improper and plainly undermines legal certainty and the rule of law.” This is how four U.S. senators – including the Chairman and Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee – recently described the European Commission’s State aid investigation into tax rulings by Member States, including into Ireland’s tax treatment of Apple. Of course the…
The EU Commission and EU Parliament want to settle for nothing less than public country-by-country-reporting, in direct conflict with G20 BEPS adoption resolution. For many good reasons, business in Europe is opposed to such publication. I do not need to dwell on the arguments here. These are widely available. My interest has been piqued by…
When UK voters went to the polls on 23 June 2016 and voted by a slim majority to leave the European Union, few of them had in mind the impact on taxation. Future generations are unlikely to view it kindly. Looked at from the present the dominating features are uncertainty and disruption of settled tax…
1. The Tendency We live in a time where the media, politicians, NGOs and activists increasingly are preoccupied with international tax matters. A simultaneous preoccupation is observed among the OECD, G20, EU countries and most other developed countries alike. This has led to continuously increasing regulatory requirements and strengthened legislation towards companies. The tendency is…
