CJEU - Recent Developments in Value Added Tax 2024

1. Introduction

The Sixth Directive and its later successor, the VAT Directive, have provided a special regime for services relating to cultural, artistic, sporting, and similar activities. The purpose of this special regime for services whose costs were included in a downstream service was to ensure their taxation at the place of consumption, to prevent distortions of competition, and to ensure simplicity of administration for taxable persons. The respective provisions are now stipulated in Art. 53 of the VAT Directive for businesses-to-business (B2B) supplies of services for admission to various events and in Art. 54(1) for business-to-consumer (B2C) supplies of services and ancillary services relating to cultural, artistic, sporting, and similar activities. In both articles, the place-of-supply is determined as the location where either events or activities actually take place.

Many of these services such as conferences, seminars, sporting activities, and similar are currently provided remotely which leads to difficulty in determining the place where they should be taxed, which has been proved in Geelen. To ensure S. 98the taxation of such remote supplies at the place of consumption, t...