Tax & Legal

In a recent judgment, the Supreme Tax Court decided that the statutory interest levied on late payment or refund of value added tax amounts pursuant to Section 233a of the General Tax Code does not contravene EU law.

The amendment to the Tax Consultancy Act passed by the Bundestag failed to secure a majority in the Bundesrat on 8 May 2026.

It should be possible to confiscate profits from complex illegal transactions, such as Cum-Ex short selling, more consistently. On 8 May 2026, the Bundesrat agreed to table a corresponding bill in the German Bundestag.

The Supreme Tax Court has handed down three judgments addressing the trade tax addback of hotel room rentals to the trading income and explained that not all expenses for renting hotel rooms must be added back. The decisions are significant for companies in the events industry that regularly rent venues and equipment as well as for companies that rent accommodation for their employees working at other locations.

Expenses incurred for business travel by private car are generally considered unreasonable and therefore cannot be fully deducted as income-related expenses if the taxpayer is provided with a company car and would not have incurred any travel expenses had he used it. This is the conclusion of the Supreme Tax Court in a recently published decision.

The Council today provisionally agreed new rules to strengthen the fight against value added tax (VAT) fraud in the EU by ramping up cooperation between member states, the European public prosecutor’s office (EPPO) and the European anti-fraud office (OLAF).

According to a judgment of the Supreme Tax Court, demonstrating the arrival of goods in another EU member State in the course of an intra-Community supply is not a prerequisite for the protection of legitimate expectations.

In the case of an atypical (non-typical) silent partnership interest in a limited partnership, the tax bases for the “partnership and atypical silent partner” and those for the limited partnership cannot be determined separately and uniformly in a single assessment notice, the Supreme Tax Court said in a most recently published decision.

The principle of altruism (selflessness) in the context of a non-profit organization does not only preclude economic benefits for members in their professional sphere. Economic benefits in the private sphere are also detrimental to a charitable status, the Supreme Tax Court said in a most recently published decision.

In a recently issued judgment, the Supreme Tax Court decided that, upon the opening of insolvency proceedings, the second correction due to uncollectible amounts does not depend on the accuracy of the first correction made in the insolvency process. The correction made at the expense of the insolvency estate is separate from the previous correction.

In today’s decision, the European Court of Justice held that the no-poach of players agreement concluded by Portuguese football clubs during the Covid-19 pandemic might be compatible with EU law.

The EU Commission calls on Germany, France and Austria to correctly transpose the provisions of the Directive on combating money laundering by criminal law.

On 28 April 2025 the EU Commission presented its plan to modernize EU lawmaking, ensuring that laws are clearer, simpler, more efficiently enforced, based on solid evidence and better aligned with the needs of citizens and businesses.

On 24 April 2026, the Bundestag passed the Ninth Act Amending the Tax Consultancy Act and Further Tax Legislation, as amended by the Bundestag’s Finance Committee.

The application pursuant to Section 21 (2) Sentence 3 of the Reorganization Tax Act to use the book value (acquisition cost) or an intermediate value as the sale price of the shares in the case of an exchange of shares does not require any specific formal requirement. It can also be made expressly or implied.

A signing bonus which is paid by a soccer club to a professional player upon the conclusion of an employment contract may be capitalized as part of the acquisition cost for the exclusive playing rights (i. e., the one-off payment made to a player upon signing a contract with a new club) if the club is required to pay a transfer fee for the player’s change of club.

In a most recent judgment, the Supreme Tax Court decided that an invoice for advance payment entitles the recipient to deduct the underlying input VAT even if it does not include an explicit reference as to the “advance payment” and provided it is apparent that the payment is made for a service still to be supplied.

In a most recently published decision, the Supreme Tax Court held that the first acquisition of a share in a partnership by a party who was not previously a partner under civil law is a taxable event for real estate transfer tax purposes pursuant to Section 1 (2a) of the Real Estate Transfer Tax Act (RETTA).

A draft cabinet bill, which has not yet been officially published, has now been submitted by the CDU/CSU and SPD proposing an amendment to introduce a temporary tax exemption in Section 3(11d) of the draft Income Tax Act for so-called “relief bonuses” of up to EUR 1,000 paid by employers

Losses arising from the inability to trade Russian government bonds and Russian shares cannot be taken into account for income tax purposes in 2022. This was the ruling of the Saxony Finance Court in Leipzig in a recent judgment.