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Are you a responsible tech partner? New government guidance is advising parties to contracts to act responsibly and fairly and support the Covid-19 response. The impact of Covid-19 on all sectors has been substantial, and the long term effects are still unknown. IT services have become more... ‘How did you get in here?’ - What rights do you have against third parties when your IT staff go rogue? The recent High Court case of Media Entertainment NV v Karyagdyyev and another [2020] EWHC 1138 (QB) is interesting, particularly for tech companies, as it involves the often feared and always undesirable headache – what rights do you have against third p... How far does the fiction of a deeming provision extend? Not far enough to let the taxpayer escape UK tax under the UK/South Africa Tax Treaty, according to the Supreme Court in Fowler v HMRC. In its recent judgment, overturning the Court of Appeal’s decision, the Supreme Court held that a South African residen... New Horizons: Quantum Computing and the Banking Sector The stage is set for quantum computing to bring about seismic changes in the world as we know it. As IBM and Google, among others, publicly race to develop quantum computers that can solve a real-world problem with an acceptable rate of error, a burgeonin... Dutch tax treatment of intra-group debt guarantees at odds with OECD guidance The paragraph of the OECD transfer pricing guidance on financial transactions dealing with parent guarantees is, in my view, incompatible with Dutch tax law and, if followed by other countries, could give rise to double taxation in certain situations. Abs... No fixed establishment through parent-subsidiary relationship Or at least not automatically. A company established outside the EU does not have a fixed establishment for VAT purposes in an EU Member State merely because it has a subsidiary in that Member State. The Court of Justice confirmed this, and that a supplie... Is ICANN retiring some top-level domains? Tech businesses are used to reading about ICANN increasing the reach of the internet with more and more top-level domains - it may therefore come as a surprise that ICANN is considering retiring some of them. ICANN’s focus is country code top-level domain... Partnership taxation: still a work in progress? Given the general view of partnership taxation – “they’re just transparent, right?” – it is somewhat surprising that how a partnership interest is accounted for, or whether a pre-sale profit distribution is made, or even possibly whether that distribution... A bonanza of buzzwords – The EU on the convergence of Blockchain, AI and IoT On 21 April, the EU Blockchain Observatory & Forum (an initiative of the European Commission to accelerate blockchain innovation within the EU) published a paper entitled “Convergence of Blockchain, AI and IoT”. This is the latest in its series of themati... UK government scraps "reading tax" early due to corona lockdown The different VAT treatment of electronic publications and their physical world equivalents has long been controversial.  As discussed previously on The Lens, in the Spring Budget 2020 back in early March 2020, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that with e...