BERLINA: Germany’s anti abuse rule that denies withholding tax exemptions on dividend payments that German subsidiaries make to their parent companies in different countries is too overreaching to comply with European Union law, the EU’s high court concluded on Wednesday.
The question of exemption referred to the European Court of Justice by a Cologne court stems from the EU’s parent-subsidiary directive, under which subsidiaries in one EU country are spared withholding taxes when paying dividends to entities in another EU country.