We are happy to inform you, not only on the latest activities of the ETC, but also on some activities of the EUCOTAX Network and on some international activities of the tax departments of both K.U. Leuven and Tilburg University.

Best regards,

Prof. Luc De Broe, Prof. Peter Essers, Prof. Eric Kemmeren, and Prof. Frans Vanistendael

This newsletter contains the following subjects:  

  PwC Chair 2010-2011
  European Tax College
  ETC Moot Court Competition
  Frans Vanistendael Lectures 3rd edition / Inaugural Lecture PwC Chair
  EUCOTAX Wintercourse

For the academic year of 2010-2011 Tilburg University and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven have appointed Professor Brian Arnold to the fourth Chair of the PricewaterhouseCoopers International and European Tax Fund. Professor Arnold is the fourth professor to hold this annually rotating chair and will be lecturing the course Capita Selecta which deals with specific topics of European and international taxation.

Brian Arnold, graduate of Harvard Law School, is a consultant at Goodmans LLP in Toronto, Canada. He taught tax law at several Canadian law faculties for 28 years. He is a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney in Australia and at the University of Economics and Business Administration in Vienna. To various Canadian government departments he has been consultant, as well as to the South African Revenue Service, the British Columbia Ministry of Revenue and the Australian and New Zealand governments. To the OECD and the Committee of Tax Experts of the United Nations he still is consultant. He has written extensively on tax matters, particularly in articles, and is a member of several editorial boards of tax journals and co-editor to the Bulletin for International Taxation.

The spring courses of 2010 have all been finished and the students are now working on their Master thesis. The defences of the thesis’s will take place in August and September.

Lectures Autumn 2010
The academic year of 2010-2011 will start in September in Tilburg, The Netherlands. The schedule for the courses is in preparation. In this first semester the Foundation Courses will be lectured:

Design and Structure of Income Tax Systems Design and Structure of Consumption Taxes International Taxation European Taxation Introduction into World Tax Systems Capita Selecta in European and International Taxation (PwC Chair) Moot Court

Application
The board of the ETC is busy selecting the students for the next academic year. It is still possible to apply for admission to the full-time (one year) and part-time (two years) programme. Another possibility is to attend a single course or one specific subject within a single course for one or two days.

More information on the courses and application can be found on our website www.europeantaxcollege.com.

From Sunday the 28th of February till Saturday the 6th of March the Moot Court Competition was held in Leuven, Belgium. This year 10 universities participated with a total of 125 participants. A field trip was organized to the European Court of Justice in Luxemburg. The final was between the teams from Vienna and Leuven. Vienna proved itself the better team and beat Leuven in a good battle. With this win Vienna won the PwC award / scholarship to the European Tax College 2010-2011.

Next year the Moot Court Competition will be held from Sunday February 27 till Saturday March 5, 2011.

On Friday the 5th of March the third Prof. em. Frans Vanistendael Lectures were successfully held. The lectures were centered around the attribution of profits to permanent establishments. Speakers on this day were Prof. Dr. Luc De Broe, Prof. em. Frans Vanistendael, Mrs. Mary Bennett, Dr. Philip Baker, Mr. André Claes and Mr. Henk Vanhulle. The day was closed by the inaugural lecture of Prof. em. Jacques Malherbe as holder of the 2009-2010 PwC Chair. The lecture was about “Permanent Establishments Claim Their Share of Profits: Does the Taxman Agree?”.

This year the EUCOTAX Wintercourse was organized from the 8th till the 17th of April in Uppsala, Sweden. 13 Universities from 12 countries participated in the 10 days during programme. In total 62 students and 25 professors and researchers took part in the Wintercourse 2010.

The main theme was The principle of equality in taxation (constitutional law, European law, WTO and tax treaties). This theme was divided into 6 subthemes for the students to be studied and explored in a thesis. During workshops, supervised by professors and researchers, the differences between the national point of view of each country for each subtheme were discussed by the students. The results of how to deal with and overcome these differences were presented and written in a paper at the end of the Wintercourse. Besides the workshops, there were 3 seminars organized, an educational field trip to Stockholm, a lecture and dinner by PwC and a student party at a traditional student club.

Because of the ash cloud caused by the Icelandic volcano there were some difficulties to get home, for every flight was cancelled. Luckily everyone found a way either by train, bus and some even by boat and got home safely. It was an unexpected ending to a fantastic time in Sweden.