Recently,
there has been passed a positive judgment by the Brussels Court of Appeal. The
verdict is positive for those who are fond of holding structures. About what
was the case exactly?
Say you
have a company X, then you can still sell the shares of that company tax free
to a 2nd Company Y, a so-called holding. This holding should pay you as a
shareholder of the first company X . The holding company got after all your
shares of company X. Usually, the holding will not pay immediately and you stay
with a claim on this holding.
The holding
company is going to pay you back (of course tax-free) and at her turn this
holding gets the money from the company X by means of management fees,
dividends (payments of already taxed benefits), etc. That's a nice way to put
money from company X tax-free on your private account.
The tax
authorities would of course prefer to raise taxes and has tried a long time to
tax the shareholder who sold his shares to a holding company. A high amount of
tax was put on the added value (so just the value) of the shares. Now says this
Court verdict, that only added value tax can be put on the difference of the
net asset value of the shares and the market value of the shares. So this is a
whole different story ... because the "value" of the shares is a
flexible concept. Another method to avoid tax problems can be to sell the
shares to certain foreign (EU) companies
