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International law firm Richards Butler has boosted its corporate finance team with the recruitment of tax consultant Richard Sowler. He is acting head of tax at Richards Butler until an additional partner is hired for the role.

Chuo Building

The US Treasury has expanded the tax policy group with three new hires.

Australian firm Gilbert & Tobin has established its first tax practice by poaching two lawyers from local rivals.

German firm Haarmann Hemmelrath has increased its Paris tax practice with the recruitment of a partner from Landwell et Associés. Alfred Fink joined on April 1 after spending five years with Landwell and prior to that six years with Coopers & Lybrand. Fink will be in charge of corporate finance and banking law, as well as international tax law. He brings with him an assistant, Etienne Mathey.

Over-complexity and over-simplicity are just two of the evils marring the sophistication of tax regimes in many Asian jurisdictions. The following article looks at how variety spices up the business of tax advice in Asia and provides the results of International Tax Review's survey into Asia's best advisers. By Sharon Cunningham

Effective April 1 2001, the Netherlands Ministry of Finance issued various decisions concerning the Dutch ruling policy and introduced transfer pricing regulations. Based on these decisions, the Dutch tax authorities will no longer sign off standard rulings, but instead will conclude advanced pricing agreements (APAs) and advanced tax rulings (ATRs). This new policy is a result of the international developments within the EU and the OECD.

In March 2001, the Tokyo Stock Exchange launched a specialized market for real estate investment trusts (J-REITs). The listing of J-REITs on the Tokyo market will give Japanese investors a new investment option in the nation's ultra-low interest environment. It is hoped that the J-REIT will promote an alternative to current financing and stimulate the real estate market.

It appears that the Indian revenue authorities have come full circle in addressing the taxation of foreign telecasting companies (FTCs) operating in India. When FTCs first started operating in India in 1993, there was no specific regime in domestic law to deal with the taxation of such entities – in this case, in respect of income earned from Indian advertisers who placed advertisements on channels broadcast by the FTCs throughout India. In the absence of a specific regime, the income would have been taxable on a net income basis, whereby all attributable expenditure would be allowed to be set off from revenues, subject to the provisions of domestic law, in arriving at the taxable income. However, given the nature of the operations, the revenue authorities realized that computing net income would be an extremely cumbersome, if not entirely insurmountable, exercise.

The Netherlands Supreme Court has recently announced decisions on the participation exemption and fiscal unity regime. Multinationals take note. By Corina van Lindonk and Mark van der Linden, Deloitte & Touche, Rotterdam and Chicago