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Law firm Mayer Brown JSM has announced that Pieter de Ridder is joining their tax transactions and consulting team after leaving a similar post at Loyens & Loeff in Singapore. De Ridder has been practising tax in Singapore since 1996, before which he spent time working in Hong Kong and Jakarta, accumulating more than two decades of Asian tax experience in the process.

The Portuguese tax authorities have referred a VAT dispute to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling, in what could become a critical case for the deduction of input VAT for exempt activities, and the conduct of the tax authorities.

Donald Moorehead, partner at Squire Patton Boggs in Washington, DC, assesses the prospects for action towards US tax reform in 2015, explaining that it's no surprise many are looking back at 1986 - the last time reform was achieved - for keys to unlock the process, but significant challenges remain.

Abi Briggs and Jon Tilson of Deloitte analyse recent developments regarding indirect taxation of the digital economy, taking into account OECD discussions and unilateral actions being proposed.

In the last quarter of 2007, the European Commission notified Spain of its decision to open a formal investigation procedure under article 88(2) of the EC Treaty concerning the tax regime for the amortisation of financial goodwill. Jose Maria Garcia-Valdecasas Alloza, partner of Balaguer – Morera & Asociados and associate lecturer at the University of Barcelona, explores the EC’s “negative tax harmonisation”

Italian firm Pirola has joined Praxity, the world’s largest group of independent accountancy firms, becoming its second Italian firm alongside Mazars.

Maik Thomas Heggmair of WTS discusses recent transfer pricing changes in Germany, including the adoption of the authorised OECD approach (AOA) into German legislation and incoming reporting changes and provides practical views on recent audit experiences.

The private banking unit of HSBC in Switzerland has barely been out of the news over the last month. Details have been revealed of how bank staff were aware they were dealing with tax non-compliant account holders and, in a large number of cases, helped some customers evade taxes. The overriding message here is that banks still have a long way to go on transparency and are doing too little to ensure they and their clients are tax compliant.

Transactions with no direct Chinese element could still be caught under the scope of the new law, for example when one party holds a Chinese branch In a strong indication of its growing commitment to enforcing tax compliance, China's State Administration of Taxation released updated indirect transfer rules to replace Notice 698. Tax professionals say the more stringent tax rules, which include safe harbour regulations, withholding tax obligations of the buyer, and clarifications of reasonable commercial purpose, are both welcome and concerning. Notice 7 is effective from February 3 2015, though applies to transactions from January 1 2008 that have not received an assessment from the tax authorities. China's Notice 698 was introduced in December 2009, but was effective for transactions dating after January 1 2008.

Many business groups view the Obama proposals as out of kilter with the rest of the world President Obama unveiled his FY 2016 Budget plan last month, seeking to replace the existing deferral system for US multinational companies and impose a minimum 19% tax on their foreign earnings, as well as charging a 14% tax on previously untaxed foreign income. Tax directors and their advisers say the proposals will harm economic growth and make US businesses less competitive in the global marketplace. They repeated that only comprehensive reform would fix the problems with the tax code.