On 22 June 2026, the department of business and tax law organised a Visiting Scholars Workshop in Munich. The workshop gave its current visitors the opportunity to present and discuss their research with researchers from the institute and one another. The topics ranged from revisiting fundamental principles of tax law to issues of sustainability from the perspective of corporate and of tax law.
Dr Qiang Cai (University of Aberdeen) defended the benefit principle in international taxation from a public economics perspective. The mainstream literature criticises the benefit principle on the grounds that governmental benefits are non-divisible. Qiang contends that this non-divisibility character rather justifies public finance through taxation instead of through market orders. Yet, he submits, while immeasurable at the individual level, benefits are observable at the totality level. This observation informs policy debates on international taxation.
Dr Pınar Başak Çoskun (Bilkent University, Ankara) addressed a growing gap in sustainability governance: companies increasingly make voluntary, good-faith forward-looking sustainability commitments such as net-zero carbon emissions that are later abandoned or left unfulfilled. Existing private law mechanisms fail to provide third parties with a comprehensive route to hold companies accountable for such broken pledges. The presentation proposed to treat these commitments as legally relevant within the company itself and makes a de lege ferenda proposal under which directors could face personal liability. Thereby part of the accountability gap between corporate promise and corporate practice would be closed.
Prof. Dr Filip Debelva’s (Catholic Univeristy of Leuven) presentation examined the continuing defensibility of the European Court of Human Rights’ judgment in Ferrazzini v Italy, in which ordinary tax disputes were excluded from the civil limb of Article 6 ECHR. It argued that this exclusion is difficult to justify from historical, doctrinal, systematic and practical perspectives. The presentation concluded that tax disputes should not be excluded from Article 6 ECHR at the threshold, but should instead be subject to calibrated procedural guarantees that take account of the particularities of tax law while preserving taxpayers’ fundamental right to a fair trial.
Glynn Cooreman’s (Catholic University of Leuven) presentation analysed the legal design of windfall taxes using legislation, case law, and basic game theory. Starting from the hypothesis that windfall taxes are wrongly analysed and interpreted as one-off measures, it put forth a repeated-game approach where legislators and taxpayers anticipate ongoing and future legislative initiatives and investments. The repeated, sequential dynamics alter the assessment of legal questions. It concluded that while this approach would offer legislators more flexibility with regard to the concept of legitimate expectations, it exposes considerable tensions with the assessment of the equality standard and the proportionality analysis.
Mika Wilson (University of Dar es Salaam) provided an overview of his envisaged PhD project examining the legal and regulatory framework governing eco-taxation in Tanzania. His presentation discussed the structure of eco-taxes in Tanzania and their intended objectives of promoting environmental sustainability and encouraging green technological innovation. The main objective of the proposed study is to assess the effectiveness of Tanzania’s eco-taxation framework in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting green innovation, with a view to determining whether the existing legal and regulatory framework is adequately designed to support environmental protection and sustainable development in green innovation.
Dr Tommaso Calculli (University of Bari “Aldo Moro”) analysed a recent measure in Italy, the “Transition 5.0” plan, aimed at providing supply-side incentives for energy efficiency through a tax credit scheme during the years 2024 and 2025. In the final months of 2025, when the sole implementing measure was approaching expiry after having been utilised for only one third of its allocated resources, it was abruptly terminated. The presentation critically reconstructs the legislative pathway that led to the ex nunc revocation, examining the extent to which legitimate expectations may have been undermined, also in the light of mutual trust in the relationship between tax authorities and business taxpayers.
July 2026