On 26 March 2019, I was pleased to conduct a LIGA-ZAKON webinar on the topic of the jurisprudence of the new Supreme Court in tax disputes with an international component.
In particular, the webinar was devoted to the two most common categories of tax disputes with an international element:
- disputes concerning the application of the concept of beneficial owner; and
- disputes on transfer pricing issues.
Below is a very brief summary of the findings of the seminar:
As to beneficial owner
- It is pleasant that the new Supreme Court keeps abreast with a global trend. In general, it adheres to the "broad economic approach" couched in 2014 in the well-known case of Donbassaero (http://reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/38106136).
- All the cases found by us at the level of the new Supreme Court have been resolved in favor of the taxpayers (for example: http://www.reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/77312120, http://www.reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/77197100 and http://www.reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/75879124).
- Interestingly, in the latter case the taxpayer leveraged a report of the Cypriot Office of Deloitte as evidence. According to the findings incorporated in the report, the Cypriot recipient of income in the form of interest was the beneficial owner of the income. It was not even guessed before that the "Big Four" could provide such services.
- The reason for such a "crazy" success of taxpayers in the new Supreme Court is really simple. So far, tax officials, at least at the level of those cases that have already been considered by the new Supreme Court, have not managed to collect information attesting that the foreign recipient of income is limited in its right to determine the further economic fate of the income.
- Undoubtedly, at the level of the lower courts there have been some examples where taxmen managed to demonstrate proper "perseverance and diligence" and carried out exchanges of information with the tax authorities of other countries. However, to the satisfaction of taxpayers and to the great regret of tax officials, in many cases, the courts do not take into account the results of such exchanges of tax information pointing out to the limitation of a foreign recipient of income in the right to determine its further economic fate.
- The courts consider the above evidence as inadmissible for formal reasons, the main of which is, as a rule, the lack of legalization (apostilation) of a document issued by the foreign tax authorities on the results of the exchange of tax information. A classic example of such a "fatal" case for taxmen, decided by the court of appeal, is available at this link: http://www.reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/72641240.
As to transfer pricing
- There is already the first case concerning the essence of transfer pricing considered by the new Supreme Court (http://www.reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/80418267).
- Honestly, there is nothing phenomenal in this case. In the past, there have been many similar cases when, before the introduction of the transfer pricing rules, the rules of the usual prices were applied.
- In this case both the taxpayer and the tax authorities (in the course of the tax inspection) used the "first method" (the method of comparable uncontrolled price) to the transactions on the exportation of grains. The new Supreme Court resolved the case in favor of the taxpayer by a reference to the fact that the tax authorities failed to prove that the prices had been understated by the taxpayer. The new Supreme Court "blamed" the tax authorities for not taking into account all the conditions for the comparability of the concerned export transactions and referring to only one source of information (the official site of the Agrarian Exchange).
- Oddly enough, but the new Supreme Court appeared to be a great fan of British LLP and a huge hater of Swiss companies=). Under very controversial circumstances, it recognizes transactions with British LLPs (for periods before the amendments to the Tax Code of Ukraine was brought according to which the attribution of transaction with British LLPs to controllable one is no more in doubt), uncontrollable (http://www.reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/80418267 and http://www.reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/8060725).
- In the meanwhile, on approximately the same level of controversy attached to the issue as to whether to treat as controllable transactions with Swiss companies in 2015 (in September 2015 Switzerland was removed from the list of low tax jurisdictions), the new Supreme Court does not express similar “altruistic” sentiments (http://www.reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/76906000).
- The new Supreme Court holds that transactions with Swiss companies carried out before September 2015 are subject to control. This is despite the fact that the taxpayer managed to submit evidence that in the canton, at the place of the registration of its Swiss counterparty, the rate of corporation tax had not been in fact 5 percentage points lower than that of Ukrainian corporate income tax.
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