Nikita Deynega has commented for RBC Pro on the position of the court that refused to allow the Federal Tax Service to impose additional charges of RUB 900 m on the logistics operator of Magnit retailer

Since the beginning of 2024, commercial courts have issued 298 first-instance decisions on claims of “ineligibility to apply VAT benefits”, “illegal splitting of a business” and “unjustified tax benefits”. The amounts of additional charges in the cases in question range from almost RUB 600 m to RUB 1.185 bn, but some of the taxpayers managed to “fend off” the claims in a court.

For example, the logistics operator of Magnit retailer – Krasnodar-based Celta LLC – received claims for more than RUB 900 m following a tax audit for 2016-2018. In particular, the Federal Tax Service (the FTS) considered that the company for 3 years for almost RUB 3 bn “overestimated” its expenses for the implementation of transport through the involvement of intermediaries who do not use VAT. The tax authorities also noted that all the contracts with intermediaries were identical in content, concluded for a long period of time and were of a framework nature. However, the court sided with the taxpayer, emphasising that the law does not prohibit the use of intermediaries’ services in transportation, and the imposition by one customer on all intermediaries of its standard contract terms does not make these intermediaries controlled by the customer.

“The court demonstrated an in-depth analysis of both the civil law differences between the constructions of contracts in carriage and transport forwarding and the economic difference between these models of interaction. In addition, in resolving the dispute, the court rightly proceeded from the fact that violations that may have been committed by third and subsequent counterparties cannot be the basis for imposing negative consequences on a taxpayer who did not know and could not have known about such violations. Unfortunately, this position has not often been applied in practice recently. We hope that the decision of the court of first instance will not be revised in the future and the taxpayer will be able to confirm its rightfulness,” Nikita Deynega, Partner, Head of Tax & Administrative Law Practice at Maxima Legal, commented on the court’s position specially for RBC Pro.

To read the full article (in Russian), please see RBC Pro website >>>