- The General Court in T-614/25 held that, in chain and triangular transactions, the mere fact that goods physically cross a border is not enough to identify which supply qualifies as the exempt intra-Community supply under Article 138(1) of the VAT Directive.
- Even where the final customer accounts for VAT under the triangular transaction simplification, that does not automatically make the first supplier’s sale VAT-exempt; the key issue is which supply the single transport is attributable to.
- The case involved Latvian supplier Trading 4, which sold goods to intermediaries in Estonia and the UK that were immediately resold to final customers in other EU states, with a single direct movement from Latvia to those final customers.
- The Latvian tax authority denied 0% VAT treatment, treating Trading 4’s sales as domestic supplies because it believed the intermediaries had already transferred ownership before export and Trading 4 knew this.
Source: meridianglobalservices.com
Note that this post was (partially) written with the help of AI. It is always useful to review the original source material, and where needed to obtain (local) advice from a specialist.
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