At a recent tax seminar arranged by the Swedish branch of the International Fiscal Association (and hosted by Delphi Advokatbyrå) in Stockholm invited representatives of the international tax department of the Swedish Treasury provided information on Sweden’s tax treaty network and current matters relating thereto.
 
With  regard to the Sweden-Austria treaty,  which - it was noted - is frequently (ab)used for eliminating capital gains taxation on the sale of shares (the technique for which shall be explained below) it was reported that a draft for a new treaty was initialled (parafé) on 2 March 1995 and that “an exchange of letters was in progress”. This correspondence between the two countries has thus been going on now for 11 (eleven) years!

 
Webb-journal on international taxation (Sweden) no 2/2005
by Peter Sundgren
September 2005
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Double tax conventions and double non-taxation

 
 
I have a friend whose tax situation is so simple that he files his tax return by short message service on his cell phone. But he always complains – which is no surprise as far as Swedish tax payers are concerned - about the amount of taxes that he keeps paying. When I informed him that certain people deriving foreign income legally can avoid taxation altogether by using international treaties for the avoidance of double taxation, his reaction changed from surprise to jealousy and then to sheer indignation. “But it is absurd ” he protested, “that an agreement the very purpose of which is to relieve double, and I repeat, double taxation, winds up doing away with taxation altogether! Something must be very wrong! And, to make matters worse, all this is effected under carefully conducted negotiations between governmental tax experts and then approved by parliaments who in normal cases demonstrate an all too ardent desire to tax us other poor devils!” 

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Det
är fråga om en mycket liten bestämmelse. Den har veterligen aldrig
tillämpats i praktiken. Och den är numera upphävd. Likväl har den
tilldragit sig ett otroligt intresse i internationella
skatteexpertkretsar.

TAXATION OF CROSS-BORDER PARTNERSHIPS

Mr. Jesper
Barenfeld at Jönköping
International Business
School, (www.ihh.hj.se),
has recently published his dissertation “Taxation of Cross-Border Partnerships,
Double-Tax Relief in Hybrid and Reverse Hybrid Situations”. (JIBS Dissertation
Series No. 025)

In the
abstract Mr. Barenfeld points out that the heterogeneity of partnership
structures as business vehicles

“constitutes
a challenging factor for countries’ legislation on foreign entity
classification. As these regimes typically disregard the tax treatment of
foreign entities for domestic tax purposes, cross-border partnerships often
face the risk of being treated as taxable persons in one country but as
transparent in another. This is referred to as asymmetrical situations.