UK 5 – Netherlands 12. That may sound like a rugby score but actually it’s the number of optional anti-avoidance provisions that each country has signed up to under the OECD’s multilateral convention on tax treaties. Another telling score is UK 8 – Netherlands 1, being the number of such provisions each country has effectively rejected. It is tempting to draw some conclusions from these scores. For example, that the Netherlands has had enough of being been publicly branded in numerous high profile tax cases and international reports as one of the world’s biggest tax havens; and on the other hand, that the UK is keeping its tax haven options open in a post-Brexit world. MLI: why? To better
It’s not often that I come across a term in a tax case that I don’t understand, but also have never even heard of. But recently I did, and it was the word aliud. It came up in an opinion issued by an Advocate-General of the European Court of Justice and, while it was the Dutch rather than the English version of the opinion (no English version has been issued as yet), it turns out that its use is not limited to Dutch cases. Desperately digging into my schoolboy Latin, I wondered if this was a long-forgotten inflection of alias or, even less likely, a reference to a genus of the onion plant. More reliable sources gave the meaning, loosely translated from the Latin alius, as ‘something differe
