Today, the General Court of the EU ruled that Ireland did not grant illegal state aid to Apple through contested tax rulings. According to the General Court, EU state aid rules require taxation to be based on the arm’s length principle, which means that tax should be levied over income allocable to value generated from functions in the jurisdiction.
An opposition member of Dutch parliament proposed a bill to introduce an exit tax and step-up into the Dutch dividend withholding tax. The exit tax would apply to migrations, mergers etc., but only to a limited number of states that do not have a comparable withholding tax (most notably: the UK).
The Dutch Ministry of Finance published the written guidance (leidraad meldingsplichtige grensoverschrijdende constructies) with further details on how to interpret and apply the Dutch implementation of EU Council Directive 2018/822 (DAC6).
The Netherlands will postpone the deadlines for the DAC6 reporting obligation by 6 months. The notification obligation will take effect on 1 January 2021 (instead of 1 July 2020). The retroactive period will be maintained. This means that structures set up from 25 June 2018 must be reported.
The European Commission decided to allow EU member states to defer the deadline of filing information on potentially aggressive arrangements (DAC6) by up to 6 months. Please note that European member states may or may not follow the postponement.
The Dutch government announced a “no tax haven” requirement for companies receiving individual aid in view of the corona crisis. Applicants may not be established in listed low tax jurisdictions (the same applies for direct subsidiaries and major shareholders), nor make payments from the Netherlands to such countries. A 12-month term applies to meet this requirement.
The Supreme Court ruled that the transfer of a newly developed property two weeks after the start of the lease constitutes a transaction for VAT, and does not qualify as a transfer of a generality of goods (Article 37d).
The Dutch Supreme Court ruled that Fixed-to-Floating Perpetual Securities are treated as debt for Dutch tax purposes. The ruling confirms the clear rules around the qualification of debt, as formulated in earlier case law.
Commentary (in Dutch) to an interesting Dutch TP case (Hof Den Bosch, 13 maart 2020, ECLI:GHSHE:2020:968), published in NL Fiscaal 2020/1121). The case is about a business restructuring and the arm's length character of the conversion remuneration.
The European Commission proposes to grant a three-month extension for filing information about cross-border tax arrangements due to the corona virus. The due date would be Nov. 30 instead of Aug. 31.