Information Note on the Court’s case-law 68

October 2004

Caisse Régionale de Crédit Agricole Mutuel du Nord v. France (dec.) - 58867/00

Decision 19.10.2004 [Section II]

Article 1 of Protocol No. 1

Article 1 para. 1 of Protocol No. 1

Possessions

Confirmation, after adoption of a new law, of tax debts which had been annulled by the lower courts: inadmissible

The applicant company was a banking establishment. I n that capacity, it enjoyed exemption from value-added tax (VAT) for a large number of operations with its clients. The rules for pro-rata calculation of the VAT deduction, provided for in the General Tax Code, were the result of transposition into French law of a European directive of 1977. The interpretation of those calculation rules was the subject of a dispute between the applicant company and the tax authorities, which challenged the method of calculating the right to a tax reduction used by the appli cant company. The company was consequently issued with a supplementary tax demand, and it applied for its cancellation. It was successful both before the court of first instance and on appeal. The Government submitted draft legislation to Parliament concer ning the interpretation of the relevant texts. While the case was pending before the final appeal court, an interpretative Act was enacted at the end of July 1991, defining the terms of the tax regulations at the origin of the dispute; the interpretation o f those rules was also the subject of a judicial opinion by the final instance. In 1994 the Conseil d’Etat , the final appeal court in this matter, held that the lower courts had applied the applicable texts incorrectly and that the calculation method chose n by the applicant company was not based on a technical interpretation of the texts. Consequently, the judicial decisions in favour of the applicant company were overturned. At the close of new proceedings, the applicant company’s application was finally d ismissed.

Inadmissible under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1: The Court notes that, in all likelihood and without the intervention of the 1991 Act, the Conseil d’Etat – which had not given a judgment justifying the applicant company’s arguments – would noneth eless have ruled, in contradiction to the lower courts, that the applicant company’s arguments were ill-founded. In any event, the judgments in the applicant company’s favour had not become final. Consequently, although the cancellation of tax debts decide d by those judgments could amount to a “claim” against the State, in the present case this was neither certain, nor established, nor due, so that the applicant company no longer had any legitimate expectation of recovering it within the meaning of the Cour t’s case-law ( cf . the judgment in Kopecký , 28 September 2004, § 50, Case-Law Report No. 67). A mere hope did not constitute a legitimate expectation. In short, in the absence of a “legitimate expectation” of having the tax assessments set aside, the applic ant company did not have any “possessions”: incompatible ratione materiae .

© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.

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