Welcome everyone to this TaxBite podcast on Beneficial Ownership.

My name is Peter and we take you today in a podcast on beneficial ownership.

This podcast is part of a series of podcasts where we'll touch on recent developments and future developments

that are relevant for you and your business in the next month and years to come. May I remind

you that you can find back this podcast, but also the other podcasts that we made on our Taxbyte website.

Today, as I mentioned, the topic of the podcast is about beneficial ownership. And I have with you three speakers. Two are international tax directors, very experienced in this topic. And that is Evie Geertz and Michael Van Geniechten.

Evie has an addition a particular focus on US multinationals.

And we also have Bram Markey with us.

Bram is a tax controversy expert and who is also very familiar with the beneficial ownership topic.

To kick off, Mikhail, what is this topic about?

Well, Peter, it all has to do with the fight against tax frauds or tax abuse,

which is also one of the pillars of the New Belgian Coalition Agreement budget.

Basically, in February 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union

ruled two interesting decisions in six individual cases, which we in practice often collectively

refer to as the Danish cases. And they basically go on the withholding tax exemptions as provided under the European Parent Subsidiary Directive and the European Interest and Royalty Directive.

And I will not go into all of the details of these cases, but in a nutshell, the Court of Justice ruled that there is something like a general principle within EU law that basically prohibits the abuse and that does EU law, even in absence of any general or specific anti-abuse provision, cannot be relied upon in case of abuse.

The Court of Justice also provided some guidance on indicators

of such tax abuse, and one of them is the lack of beneficial ownership. And within this specific

context, the concept seems heavily influenced by the OECD commentaries, does imply a very broad and basically more

economic approach. And tax authorities within the EU and also including our Belgian tax authorities

are reading in these decisions arguments to scrutinize holding financing IP structures if they

lack business purpose and relevant economic

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