It is often said that the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines emphasize substance over form, when it comes to delineating controlled transactions. This is true insofar as it goes, but it gives rise to a common misconception that functional analysis trumps legal agreements. It’s true that if an intercompany agreement (put in place in advance, or ‘ex …

Sometimes, when you’re very close to the detail of something, you think what you do is obvious, and everyone else should automatically know what you know. But that’s clearly not the case – as shown by the questions we receive about our Toolkit of template intercompany agreements. Here are some of the questions we’ve received in recent months: …

What goes around, comes around. Every action has an opposite reaction. Every legal right is matched by a corresponding legal obligation. This is true in the area of international group structures and transfer pricing policies, as it is in every other area of life. For example, a distributor may be intended for TP purposes to be exposed to limited risks …

One of the most common questions we are asked is which law should govern an intercompany agreement (ICA), and to what respect ICAs should be localised. The starting point is that every ICA should specify which law governs it and which courts would have jurisdiction in the case of a dispute. This is because there needs to be a contract in order to achieve …