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Review of the court practice of the Supreme Court of Ukraine in the cases regarding taxation issues during the effect of the Law of Ukraine “On Ensuring the Right for Fair Trial”

17 August, 2015 Court practice

Review of the court practice of the Supreme Court of Ukraine in the cases regarding taxation issues during the effect of the Law of Ukraine “On Ensuring the Right for Fair Trial”

August 17, 2015

On March 28, 2015 the Law of Ukraine “On Ensuring the Right for Fair Trial”, that, in particular, amended the Code of Administrative Legal Proceedings of Ukraine in the part of the authorities of the Supreme Court of Ukraine (hereinafter “the Supreme Court”), came into force.

The primary amendment is the possibility to apply directly to the Supreme Court. According to the previous version of the Code the Higher Administrative Court of Ukraine (hereinafter “the Higher Court”) decided on case referral to the Supreme Court and that was the cause of certain conflict between the mentioned judicial bodies.

This leads to considerable increase of the number of applications submitted to the Supreme Court regarding review of judicial decisions and correspondingly of the number of rulings delivered by it. But the analysis of these rulings makes obvious the beginning of unfavorable tendency according to which the Supreme Court “breaks down” the established and, what is important, entirely justified practice of the Higher Court in number of points of principle.

First of all such situation appears in result of inconsistency of practice of the Higher Court which applies the same legal norms regarding similar cases in different ways without any grounds for that. Moreover, it seems that in such a way the Supreme Court shows to the Higher Court whose word is decisive in administrative proceedings and tries to draw a line under this issue. We would like to remind that the legal opinion of the Supreme Court is mandatory for lower instances and for all subjects who use legal norm, analyzed by it, in their activity. That is why the Higher Court is starting to change its practice according to the position of the Supreme Court.

However, the position taken by the Supreme Court in the discussed cases, as opposed to the position of the Higher Court, is obviously not in favor of the taxpayers and at least disregards the principle of lawfulness of the taxpayer’s decision.

Here below there are a number of the most interesting rulings of the Supreme Court starting from March 28, 2015 which arouse doubts whether they are in compliance with the legal norms as well as others which shall be considered while deciding analogous cases by the courts of Ukraine and applying respective legal norms.

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