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This article deals with the decision taken by the Court of Justice of the European Union in of 26 February 2019 in N Luxembourg I et al. (Joined Cases C-115/16, C-118/16, C-119/16 and C-299/16) and T Danmark et al. (Joined Cases C-116/16 and C-117/17). The authors acknowledge that the "Danish beneficial ownership cases" address a number of important and timely issues, especially with regard to the concept of abuse under EU law. These include: (i) the expansion of the general anti-abuse principle enshrined in EU law to areas of tax law that are subject to minimal harmonization; (ii) the use of OECD materials to define the beneficial ownership concept; (iii) the conflation of the beneficial ownership concept with the general anti-abuse principle and the Court's attempt to give the notion of "abuse" workable contours; and (iv) the reading of an effective subject-to-tax clause with regard to interest income into the definition of "company" laid down in the EU Interest and Royalties-Directive (2003/49) (IRD). Domestic courts will likely struggle to translate the abstract guidance of the "Danish beneficial ownership cases" into concrete decisions, that practitioners and academics alike will have to discuss building blocks and nuances of the Grand Chamber's decisions for quite some time, and that consideration needs to be given to the impact of the cases on current tax structures.

This article examines the decision of the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in Berlioz Investment Fund SA (Case C-682/15) delivered on 16 May 2017, following the Opinion of Advocate General Wathelet of 10 January 2017. The case concerned the levying of tax penalties in circumstances in which a third party partially refused to provide the Luxembourg tax authorities with information requested, by way of mutual assistance under the Mutual Assistance Directive (2011/16), by the French tax authorities. Having clarified that when exchanging information by way of mutual assistance under an EU directive, EU Member States are implementing EU Law, the Grand Chamber confirmed the right to judicial review in connection with the levying of penalties and acknowledged Berlioz' legal standing to challenge the foreseeable relevance of information that one tax authority asks another to exchange by way of mutual assistance. When reviewing the legality of the request in this context, the judiciary will ascertain whether manifestly irrelevant information is being requested, without necessarily informing the taxpayer of the details.

This article deals with the decision taken by the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union in World Duty Free Group (formerly Autogrill Espana); Banco Santander and Santusa Holding (Joined Cases C-20/15 P and C-21/15 P), on 21 December 2016, following decisions of the General Court of the European Union of 7 November 2014 in Autogrill Espana and of 7 November 2014 in Banco Santander and Santusa and the Opinion of Advocate General Wathelet of 28 July 2016. The case concerned Spanish tax rules that allowed Spanish enterprises tax amortization of financial goodwill arising from the acquisition of shareholdings in foreign companies, but not from the acquisition of shareholdings in domestic companies. The Grand Chamber reversed the decisions of the General Court and clarified the meaning of selective aid as the term is used in article 107 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) (2007).It held that an aid can be regarded as selective if the national tax measure deviates from the reference framework: it is not necessary to show that the national tax measure actually favours a specific group of undertakings or the production of specific goods.