The profit from the sale of a share in the upper-tier partnership as prescribed in Section 7 sentence 2 no. 2 Trade Tax Act is not to be allocated to the hidden reserves of the upper-tier partnership and the hidden reserves of the lower-tier partnership. It is rather a single and uniform sales transaction at the level of the upper-tier partnership, the Supreme Tax Court said in a most recently published decision.
In a decision published in March 2017 the Supreme Tax Court held that - in the case of a two-tier partnership structure – the interest expense of the Dutch partner holding only an indirect share in a German limited partnership is nevertheless tax deductible when computing his limited German tax liability resulting from his investment in the German partnership.
In its decision of 12 May 2016 the Supreme Tax Court held that -in the case of a two-tier partnership structure- the trade tax loss carry-forward of the lower-tier partnership is fully eliminated, if the upper-tier partnership, which holds a 100% -interest in the income and assets of the lower-tier partnership, is merged down-stream and thus ceases to exist. Referring to previous case law, the Court’s reasoning was that the upper-tier partnership, as co-entrepreneur of the lower-tier partnership, was also the holder of the partnership’s trade tax loss-relief.
