Cibo Participations SA v Directeur régional des impôts du Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
Date: 2001-09-27
18 The Court has consistently held that Article 4 of the Sixth Directive must be interpreted as meaning that a holding company whose sole purpose is to acquire holdings in other undertakings and which does not involve itself directly or indirectly in the management of those undertakings, without prejudice to its rights as a shareholder, does not have the status of taxable person and has no right to deduct tax under Article 17 of the Sixth Directive (Case C-60/90 Polysar Investments Netherlands [1991] ECR I-3111, paragraph 17, and Case C-142/99 Floridienne and Berginvest [2000] ECR I-9567, paragraph 17).
19 It is clear from case-law that that conclusion is based, amongst other things, on the finding that the mere acquisition and holding of shares in a company is not to be regarded as an economic activity, within the meaning of the Sixth Directive, conferring on the holder the status of a taxable person. The mere acquisition of financial holdings in other undertakings does not amount to the exploitation of property for the purpose of obtaining income therefrom on a continuing basis because any dividend yielded by that holding is merely the result of ownership of the property (see the judgments in Case C-333/91 Sofitam [1993] ECR I-3513, paragraph 12, and in Case C-80/95 Harnas & Helm [1997] ECR I-745, paragraph 15).
20 However, the Court has held that it is otherwise where the holding is accompanied by direct or indirect involvement in the management of the companies in which the holding has been acquired, without prejudice to the rights held by the holding company as shareholder (Polysar, paragraph 14, and Floridienne and Berginvest, paragraph 18).
21 It is clear from paragraph 19 of the judgment in Floridienne and Berginvest that direct or indirect involvement in the management of subsidiaries must be regarded as an economic activity within the meaning of Article 4(2) of the Sixth Directive where it entails carrying out transactions which are subject to VAT by virtue of Article 2 of that directive, such as the supply by a holding company such as Cibo of administrative, financial, commercial and technical services to its subsidiaries.
22 The answer to the first question referred for a preliminary ruling must therefore be that the involvement of a holding company in the management of companies in which it has acquired a shareholding constitutes an economic activity within the meaning of Article 4(2) of the Sixth Directive where it entails carrying out transactions which are subject to VAT by virtue of Article 2 of that directive, such as the supply by a holding company to its subsidiaries of administrative, financial, commercial and technical services.
The third question
27 It should be observed at the outset that the deduction system is meant to relieve the trader entirely of the burden of the VAT payable or paid in the course of all his economic activities. The common system of VAT consequently ensures complete neutrality of taxation of all economic activities, whatever their purpose or results, provided that they are themselves subject in principle to VAT (Case C-98/98 Midland Bank [2000] ECR I-4177, paragraph 19, and Case C-408/98 Abbey National [2001] ECR I-1361, paragraph 24).
28 Article 17(5) of the Sixth Directive, in the light of which Article 17(2) must be interpreted, lays down the rules applicable to the right to deduct VAT where the VAT relates to input transactions used by the taxable person both for transactions covered by paragraphs 2 and 3, in respect of which value added tax is deductible, and for transactions in respect of which value added tax is not deductible, limiting the right of deduction to that portion of the VAT which is attributable to the former transactions. The use of the words for transactions in Article 17(5) shows that, in order to give rise to the right to deduct under paragraph 2, the goods or services acquired must have a direct and immediate link with the output transactions in respect of which VAT is deductible, and that the ultimate aim pursued by the taxable person is irrelevant in this respect (see BLP Group, paragraphs 18 and 19, Midland Bank, paragraph 20, and Abbey National, paragraph 25).
29 According to settled case-law, Article 2 of the First Council Directive 67/227/EEC of 11 April 1967 on the harmonisation of legislation of Member States concerning turnover taxes (OJ, English Special Edition 1967, p. 14, hereinafter the First Directive) and Article 17(2), (3) and (5) of the Sixth Directive must be interpreted as meaning that, in principle, the existence of a direct and immediate link between a particular input transaction and a particular output transaction or transactions in respect of which VAT is deductible is necessary before the taxable person is entitled to deduct input VAT and in order to determine the extent of such entitlement (Midland Bank, paragraph 20, and Abbey National, paragraph 26).
30 It should also be borne in mind that, according to the fundamental principle which underlies the VAT system, and which follows from Article 2 of the First Directive and Article 2 of the Sixth Directive, VAT applies to each transaction by way of production or distribution after deduction of the VAT directly borne by the various cost components (Midland Bank, paragraph 29, and Abbey National, paragraph 27).
31 It follows from that principle, as well as from the rule that, in order to give rise to the right to deduct, the goods or services purchased must have a direct and immediate link with the output transactions in respect of which VAT is deductible, that there was a right to deduct the VAT borne by those goods or services because the expenditure incurred in acquiring them was a component of the cost of those output transactions. The expenditure must therefore form part of the costs of the output transactions in respect of which VAT is deductible which use the goods and services acquired (Midland Bank, paragraph 30, and Abbey National, paragraph 28).
33 On the other hand, the costs of those services are part of the taxable person's general costs and are, as such, cost components of an undertaking's products. Such services therefore do, in principle, have a direct and immediate link with the taxable person's business as a whole (see BLP Group, paragraph 25, Midland Bank, paragraph 31, and Abbey National, paragraphs 35 and 36).
34 In this connection, it is clear from the first paragraph of Article 17(5) of the Sixth Directive that, where a taxable person uses goods and services in order to carry out both transactions in respect of which VAT is deductible and transactions in respect of which it is not, he may deduct only that proportion of the VAT which is attributable to the former.
35 The answer to the third question referred for a preliminary ruling must therefore be that expenditure incurred by a holding company in respect of the various services which it purchased in connection with the acquisition of a shareholding in a subsidiary forms part of its general costs and therefore has, in principle, a direct and immediate link with its business as a whole. Thus, if the holding company carries out both transactions in respect of which VAT is deductible and transactions in respect of which it is not, it follows from the first paragraph of Article 17(5) of the Sixth Directive that it may deduct only that proportion of the VAT which is attributable to the former.
The second question
41 The Court has already had occasion to hold that, since the receipt of dividends is not the consideration for any economic activity, it does not fall within the scope of VAT. Consequently, dividends resulting from shareholding fall outside the deduction entitlement (Sofitam, paragraph 13, and Floridienne and Berginvest, paragraph 21).
42 Certain features of dividends account, in particular, for their exclusion from VAT. First, it is not in dispute that the existence of distributable profits is generally a prerequisite of paying a dividend and that payment is thus dependent on the company's year-end results. Second, the proportions in which the dividend is distributed are determined by reference to the type of shares held, in particular by reference to classes of shares, and not by reference to the identity of the owner of a particular shareholding. Lastly, dividends represent, by their very nature, the return on investment in a company and are merely the result of ownership of that property (Polysar, paragraph 13, and Floridienne and Berginvest, paragraph 22).
43 In view, specifically, of the fact that the amount of the dividend thus depends partly on unknown factors and that entitlement to dividends is merely a function of shareholding, the direct link between the dividend and a supply of services, which is necessary if the dividends are to constitute consideration for the services, does not exist even where the services are supplied by a shareholder who is paid dividends (Floridienne and Berginvest, paragraph 23).
44 In the circumstances, it is appropriate to emphasise that, since the receipt of dividends does not fall within the scope of VAT, dividends paid by subsidiaries to their holding company which is a taxable person in respect of other activities and which supplies management services to those subsidiaries must be excluded from the denominator of the fraction used to calculate the deductible proportion under Article 19 of the Sixth Directive (Floridienne and Berginvest, paragraph 32).