Deloitte
won the awards for European tax and transfer pricing firm
of the year and was the most successful organisation at the
dinner at the Dorchester hotel in London. It won 20 of the 73
that were presented.
The big-four professional services firm was only one of the
leading firms of tax advisers and lawyers that were represented
at the annual awards ceremony, which was taking place for the
ninth time.
The bulk of the awards were for the tax and transfer
pricing firms of the year in 26 European jurisdictions and
South Africa. Twenty one pan-European awards covering other
practice areas such as tax disputes and indirect tax, and
industries such as energy, financial services, and media and
entertainment were also presented.
Ernst & Young won 11 awards, doubling up for tax and
transfer pricing in Ukraine and also being named as European
tax compliance and reporting firm of the year and the award for
European tax policy.
Other winners included Taxand, which won five awards,
European indirect firm of the year among them; PwC, which won
the transfer pricing awards in Belgium, Russia and Switzerland
and KPMG, which was named as tax firm of the year in Finland
and Russia. 
Law firm winners included the Best Friends Tax Network, DLA
Piper, Freshfields Bruckhaus & Deringer, Latham &
Watkins and Simmons & Simmons.
Find out
here who was nominated and who won.
Methodology
In addition to the in-house categories, national awards were
also presented for tax and transfer pricing to firms in these
27 jurisdictions or regions:
Austria, Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania),
Belgium, Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czech Republic,
Romania, Slovenia and Slovak Republic), Cyprus, Denmark,
Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy,
Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal,
Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK
and Ukraine.
To decide the winners, International Tax Review's
team of journalists undertook detailed research from a variety
of sources.
Submissions from
firms were a vital part of this research. To compile the
shortlists and choose the winners, the magazine's editorial
staff also consulted a large number of tax executives, tax
advisers and lawyers to gain their perspective on the
ground-breaking work that firms advised on in the January 1
2012 to December 31 2012 period.
The awards were judged according to:
• Size (Not conclusive, though it does indicate what a
tax team is capable of taking on)
• Innovation (Did the solution the adviser employ show
something more than the straightforward answer that is commonly
used?)
• Complexity (Did the matter address tax issues that were
out of the ordinary? What ingenuity did the adviser show to
solve them?)