Disponible únicamente en formato electrónico en la Biblioteca del IEF.

Resumen.

Due to the introduction of the Multilateral Convention (MLI), an ever-growing number of the world's international tax treaties will contain a treaty-based anti-avoidance rule known as the principal purpose test (PPT). These PPT provisions will almost certainly play an extremely important role in preventing international tax avoidance. With the introduction of such broad and powerful anti-avoidance rules comes the risk of individual countries, through their revenue authorities and their courts, developing divergent and state-centric views as to the interpretation of the PPT. This risk is quite considerable, and there are many reasons why a harmonized basis of interpretation may not, in reality, emerge. If courts pursue an individual and diverse approach to the interpretation of the PPT, the same transaction will be viewed as being effective in one jurisdiction and ineffective in another. From a broader perspective, this is undesirable, and it should not occur for policy and interpretative reasons. Why is the case for interpreting the PPT consistently, with a common meaning, so compelling? There is one major reason, and it is an obvious one: the PPT can now be found in thousands of treaties, and it is exactly the same test in all of these. It is clear that an international autonomous meaning is intended to be introduced through the uniform adoption of the PPT.