India and Cyprus have recently revised the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) to be effective from April 01, 2017 and January 01, 2017 in India and Cyprus respectively.

Before 2013, Cyprus was a favoured jurisdiction for investments into India as capital gains from the sale of shares held by Cyprus based investors in Indian companies was not taxable in India. However, due to non-compliance of its information sharing obligations, India declared Cyprus a Notified Jurisdictional Area (NJA). This led to significant uncertainties. While the DTAA had not been rescinded, this development resulted in adverse implications for Cyprus based investors, including, inter alia, higher rate of withholding taxes, application of transfer pricing provisions to transactions with Cyprus based entities even though they are not related, etc. Thus, conducting regular business transactions between entities of both countries became difficult with many transactions getting deferred.

The revised DTAA is the culmination of prolonged negotiations and discussions between both the countries to address this situation. Pursuant to the execution of the revised DTAA, the notification declaring Cyprus as NJA has been rescinded.
Continue Reading Revision of the India-Cyprus DTAA: On Expected Lines