Is private equity the devil’s plaything?

Hope dies last. In the last artic­les in the FYB Finan­cial Year­book 2020: “Πάντα ῥεῖ — Ever­y­thing flows!”, “Little flows in the right direc­tion!” (FYB Finan­cial Year­book 2022) and “Brea­king out of a suppo­sed time warp” (FYB Finan­cial Year­book 2023), we were still hopeful and opti­mi­stic about a (return to) syste­ma­tic or dogma­ti­cally correct taxa­tion of private equity.

Howe­ver, after taking a closer look at many deve­lo­p­ments in recent years and not least because of the recent article “Opera­tion Luxem­bourg” in a well-known German busi­ness maga­zine, a certain resi­gna­tion is now spre­a­ding. As we had feared, our cautiously expres­sed wish last year for a simple accep­tance of the case law deve­lo­ped by the Fede­ral Fiscal Court (BFH), the highest German fiscal juris­dic­tion, on the return of capi­tal contri­bu­ti­ons in the case of third-party corpo­ra­ti­ons was unfort­u­na­tely not granted.

For more than 27 years now, our law firm has been deal­ing with a wide range of tax compli­ance issues for private equity funds and their (German) shareholders.