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Samantha Schmitz-Merle The Luxembourg tax authorities have recently released a Circular which provides guidance on the tax treatment of income derived by Luxembourg limited partnerships (LP). The Circular follows the changes introduced by the Alternative Investment Fund Managers (AIFM) Law of July 12 2013 which implemented the AIFM Directive (AIFMD) into Luxembourg Law, created the special limited partnership (société en commandite spéciale, SCSp), and changed both the corporate and tax rules applicable to the standard Limited Partnership (société en commandite simple, SCS). While SCS and SCSp are tax transparent entities and therefore not subject to corporate income tax (CIT) in Luxembourg, their business may be considered as commercial and thus subject to Luxembourg municipal business tax (MBT, at a rate of 6.75% in Luxembourg-city) if they effectively perform a commercial activity or if their activity is commercially tainted (that is, if the general partner of the SCS or SCSp is a joint stock company which owns a partnership interest of at least 5%).

Donald Vella

David Cuellar

Peter Dachs The concept of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) has been much discussed at various international fora. From a South African perspective, the Davis Tax Committee has been set up, inter alia, to address the issue of BEPS in a South African context.

Joseph Hong Recently, the number of free trade agreement-related disputes has increased in Korea, and many cases involve country-of-origin verification by the customs authority of the exporting country under what is called an 'indirect verification regime'. In this regime, the customs authority of the exporting country conducts origin verification at the request of the customs authority of the importing country, and the FTAs adopting this regime usually require that the reply from the exporting country must be provided within a certain period and the reply must contain detailed information related to origin determination unless there are exceptional circumstances. However, the term 'exceptional circumstances' has been very narrowly interpreted by Korean courts and, as a result, importers are being punished for the failure by the customs authority of the exporting country to comply with the requirements under the FTAs. In 2014 Guhap 51777 (November 25 2014), the Seoul Administrative Court held that the unavailability of relevant documents due to a short document retention period under the law of the exporting country is not one of the exceptional circumstances which justifies non-compliance with the requirements under the relevant FTA. In this case, the importer at issue (Company N) is a Korean subsidiary of a Swiss-based multinational pharmaceutical company. In 2007 and 2008, Company N imported pharmaceutical products from a Swiss company. Preferential duty rates under the Korea-EU Free Trade Agreement (EU FTA) were applied based on the certificate of origin issued by the exporter.

Jim Fuller

Antonio Viñuela

Law firm Mayer Brown JSM has announced that Pieter de Ridder is joining their tax transactions and consulting team after leaving a similar post at Loyens & Loeff in Singapore. De Ridder has been practising tax in Singapore since 1996, before which he spent time working in Hong Kong and Jakarta, accumulating more than two decades of Asian tax experience in the process.

UK tax code dwarfs literary texts The past month has seen some intense parliamentary scrutiny of the UK revenue authorities and, by extension, the British tax system, and one interesting fact Tax Relief pulled out is that the country's tax code is more than 17,000 pages long. If you were to add the total page-count of the Bible, the Qur'an and the Bhagavad Gita – sacred texts of the world's three largest religions – you would have less than a fifth of the pages of the UK's tax legislation. To account for secularism, throw in War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and all seven Harry Potter books by Joanne Rowling and you'd still only be around half way there.

Dr Thomas Schänzle