Within the European Union, there exists a fundamental tension between the fiscal sovereignty of its Member States, in particular in the field of direct taxation, and the requirements of the Internal Market, which aim at the abolition of any regulatory or fiscal obstacles to cross border movement...

Tax transparent limited liability entities (TTLLEs) such as the GmbH & Co. KG in Germany, the trading trust in Australia, or the S Corporation and the LLC in the U.S., can be found in many developed economies. While these entities are to a large extent functionally equivalent, their underlying...

Much work has been done by international organizations, tax scholars around the world and business experts on the future shape of the taxation of the digitalized economy. Starting from the assumption that any “ring-fencing” of the digitalized economy should be avoided, it is far from easy to...

For decades the Swiss banking secrecy has made it a criminal act for banks in Switzerland to reveal information about their customers' identities. As of 2018, Switzerland will exchange banking information on foreign bank customers with the respective home countries on an automatic basis. This...

The question of why and how to tax the digitalized economy has been at the top of the international tax policy debate since the inception of the BEPS Action Plan in 2013. Over the years, a number of approaches have been discussed, including far-reaching proposals to fully or partially...

State aid discipline under Art.107, 108 TFEU has established itself as a major constraint to the tax sovereignty of national legislators. By analyzing a great number of CJEU judgments delivered during the last five years, this article lays out both the conceptual and the political issues which...

In two recent cases “T Danmark” and “N Luxembourg 1” the European Court of Justice delivered landmark judgments on the impact of the concept of “abuse of law” in the area of taxation. In these judgments the Court promoted the recurrent notion that “European law cannot be relied...

Based on the sensitivity of the European Financial Markets highlighted by the last financial crisis, the European Union is pushing for reforms of the existing regulatory framework and has also proposed a Financial Transaction Tax. Until now, the European Union has already adopted a Regulation on...

In his David R. Tillinghast Lecture given at NYU in 1998, H. David Rosenbloom presented the tax world with a critical view as to the existence of an “international tax regime”. Has the world changed since? On the one hand there is a strong move towards international tax coordination,...

The European Union is in the process to establish “public country-by-country reporting” as a new and wide reaching obligation for multinationals to disclose tax-relevant numbers to a global audience, going beyond the OECD consensus which combined cross-border exchange of reports with...