Simplification measures EU VAT case law

4 cases of the Court of Justice and the General Court of the European Union on this point of VAT law, from 2011 to 2025.

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Provisions these cases interpret most

Article 42 of Directive 2006/112/EC Place of an intra-Community acquisition of goods · 2 of these cases
Article 141 of Directive 2006/112/EC Exemptions for intra-Community acquisitions of goods · 2 of these cases
Article 41 of Directive 2006/112/EC Place of an intra-Community acquisition of goods · 1 of these cases
Article 395 of Directive 2006/112/EC Simplification measures and measures to prevent tax evasion or avoidance · 1 of these cases
Article 265 of Directive 2006/112/EC Recapitulative statements · 1 of these cases
Article 11 of Sixth Directive 77/388/EEC Taxable amount · 1 of these cases

The 4 cases, most recent first

Under each case, what the Court decided, from its summary. The summaries are AI-generated and are not official documents: open the case for the Court’s own text.

T-646/24 MS KLJUČAROVCI

Judgment · 3 December 2025 · Slovenia

Triangular simplification in a four party chain, and fraud

Article 141(c) does not require the person to whom the subsequent supply is made to take physical possession or receipt. Transport to that person's own customer in the same Member State does not prevent the condition being met, and the intermediary's knowledge of the onward supply is irrelevant, transactions being taxed on their objective characteristics. However, the authorities and courts of the Member State of identification must refuse both the Article 42 and 141 scheme and the second paragraph of Article 41 reduction where the acquirer knew or should have known it was participating in fraud in the chain. Useful for traders and advisers structuring chain transactions.

C-276/19 Commission v United Kingdom (VAT – Scheme applicable to futures markets)

Judgment · 14 May 2020 · United Kingdom

Extending a pre-1978 derogation without fresh notification

The Court declared an infringement of Article 395(2). Derogations must be construed strictly and cannot be stretched to transactions excluded when the original notification was made, still less to markets covering types of transaction that did not then exist, such as carbon emission allowance trading. Sharing the same purpose is not enough. Only notification allows the Commission and Council to verify compliance. The Court expressly declined to rule on whether the measures satisfied the revenue test in Article 395(1). A reminder that grandfathered pre-1978 simplifications are frozen by their original notification text.

C-580/16 Firma Hans Bühler

Judgment · 19 April 2018 · Austria

Triangulation simplification, identification in the dispatch Member State and late recapitulative statements

Article 141(c) is met because only the VAT number under which the intermediary made the acquisition matters, so establishment and identification in the dispatch Member State do not block the simplification. Late filing of the recapitulative statement is a formal failure and cannot alone trigger Article 41 where the substantive condition in Article 42(a) is met, nor need the number still be valid when the statement is filed. Refusal remains possible where the taxable person knowingly participated in evasion or the breach prevents proof of the substantive conditions. Intermediaries in ABC chains can rely on triangulation even where they hold a VAT number in the dispatch Member State, provided they use their other number for the acquisition.

C-489/09 Vandoorne

Judgment · 27 January 2011 · Belgium

Bad debt relief under a single-stage tobacco tax label scheme

The Court held that those provisions do not preclude such legislation. Intermediate suppliers under the scheme neither deduct input tax nor owe output tax, so they have no VAT debt capable of refund. That the tax is economically included in the price they paid is irrelevant. Because the taxable amount is fixed by reference to the final retail price, non-payment does not reduce it, and a refund would affect tax revenue at the final consumption stage to a non-negligible extent. Confirms that bad debt relief is structurally unavailable to wholesalers and distributors within Member States operating tax label style single-stage collection for manufactured tobacco.