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Abstract:
Abuse of tax law is both a complex and ambiguous concept per se. Added to the fact that each country has its own approach, which entails differing consequences as regards domestic, European community and international tax law, abuse of tax law across Europe may become a real puzzle. A thorough analysis of such concept requires both to bring out common features, shared by all domestic approaches of the countries at stake – i.e., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK – but also to describe the theoretical and practical specificities of each approach. The second part of this article, which apprehends the Italian, Spanish and British approaches, completes the first scan of the similarities and dissimilarities of the same concept, viewed through varied domestic prisms (for the French and German approaches, see EC Tax Review 2010-2). For example, on the one hand, Italy, Spain and the UK all have a prior ruling procedure, and apply no specific penalty to abusive schemes – as France does for example. On the other hand however, their approaches differ on a certain number of topics: the obligation of disclosure, for example, is compulsory in some cases in the UK whereas there is no such obligation in Italy or in Spain.
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