Tax and legal treatment of hybrid financial instruments

Abstract

Besides the motives not prevailingly concerning the tax, hybrid financial instruments are used both in the context of one tax system, and particularly in the international scenario, aiming at tax savings generation. Depending on whether the participants in the transaction are taxpayers within the same tax system, or not, the paper analyses the tax and legal consequences of the classification of hybrid financial instruments. Special attention has been paid to the tax and legal treatment of hybrid financial instruments in the Serbian taxation legislation, in which, for taxation purposes, there is no possibility of different classification in relation to the way it has been done in terms of company law and accounting. This drawback in Serbian taxation legislative on the one hand opens the possibility for tax planning by using hybrid financial instruments, while on the other hand it is an area that should be specifically regulated. In addition, in terms of the international scenario, using a comparative method, the paper analyses the rules for the classification of hybrid financial instruments defined by OECD-Model convention and the relevant EU directives.

Keywords

• hybrid financial instruments
• tax planning
• corporate taxation
• equity
• debt