On July 23, 2020, a team of ZRVP lawyers obtained a final solution of The High Court of Cassation and Justice based on which the client was exempted from payment of the tax on real estate from the industrial parks. The tax facilities from which the companies residing in the industrial parks had been benefiting since 2004, and namely exemption from payment of taxes on buildings and land, were not maintained by the authorities as of 2014. Furthermore, certain tax bodies issued retroactive tax decisions, with interests and penalties, the amounts levied on each investor from the industrial areas reaching millions of Euros.
Concretely, Intermed Consulting & Management S.R.L., a resident of Sema Park, received annually from the District 6 Local Taxes and Duties Directorate confirmations of exemption from the payment of tax in the period 2009-2014. Furthermore, DITL District 6 even ordered its reimbursement when paid voluntarily. The element of surprise occurred in 2014 when the same authority established as incumbent on the same entity, to which, for years, it had been communicating that it was exempted from payment, the obligation to pay tax on the real estate from the industrial parks of approximately Lei 17 million and penalties amounting to Lei 11 for the period 2010-2014.
“The judgment ruled by The High Court of Cassation and Justice remedies a situation deriving from a non-legal approach of the local authorities, generated by a regulation interpreted non-unitarily. All companies residing in industrial parks had been confronting with this problem after 2013, when the local tax authorities reconsidered the policy of exemption from the payment of the tax on the real estate from the industrial parks,” Ovidiu Serban, Managing Associate of ZRVP, declared.
The legal importance of this solution consists in the fact that ZRVP’s team has managed to change the caselaw of The High Court of Cassation and Justice, which, in a similar case, had confirmed its older caselaw.
The team managing the case was formed of Cosmin Vasile, Managing Partner, Ovidiu Serban, Managing Associate, Simona Oprea, Senior Associate, and Ioana Hoeckl, Partner ZRVP Tax.