Search for:
Category

Sweden

Category

According to Article 40.1 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the national supervisory authorities in the European Economic Area shall “encourage the drawing up of codes of conduct intended to contribute to the proper application” of the GDPR. A prerequisite for codes of conduct to be prepared by Swedish associations and bodies, which represent categories of personal data controllers or processors, is that the Swedish Data Protection Authority (IMY), pursuant to Art. 41 GDPR, has to establish the requirements that will apply to their accreditation bodies, the so-called supervisory bodies, which will be responsible in monitoring compliance with the code of conduct by the controllers or processors that undertake to apply it.

On 22 March 2023, the European Commission tabled a proposal for a Directive on substantiation and communication of explicit environmental claims.
The proposal aims to harmonize the evaluation and monitoring of voluntary environmental claims – often referred to as “green claims” – towards EU consumers and control the proliferation of public and private environmental labels. Complementing the March 2022 proposal for a Directive on empowering consumers for the green transition as a lex specialis by providing more specific requirements on the substantiation, communication and verification of green claims, it contributes to the fight against “greenwashing”.

In March 2021, the EU approved new reporting rules in a directive known as DAC7. The directive will require the operators of online platforms for the sale of goods and certain services, to collect, verify and share data on their sellers and their transactions concluded on the online platform. EU member states have until 31 December 2022 to implement DAC7 into national law. Certain platform operators will become a reporting platform and will need to start collecting and verifying data points in compliance with the DAC7 reporting requirements. The collected data points must be reported to the tax authorities of the relevant EU member state annually.

Overruling earlier precedent, the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court decided, in a ruling from 4 February 2021, that the supply of connectivity, capacity and space in a data center should not be exempt from VAT liability as letting of immovable property. The ruling aligns Swedish law with the reasoning of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) in the recent A Oy case and is positive news for the Swedish co-location and data center industry.

Since 2013, even if the interest income from a loan to an affiliated company in Sweden was taxed at a rate of at least 10% in the lender’s country of residence, the interest deduction was often disallowed on the ground that the principal reason for the debt having arisen was for the group to receive a substantial tax benefit. Last Wednesday, 20 January 2021, the ECJ ruled that it is contrary to EU law to deny interest deduction on cross-border loans on this ground if the interest would have been considered deductible if the lender had been a Swedish entity. This landmark ruling provides companies the possibility to reassess non-deductible interest costs in Sweden.