In late July, the German federal government published a draft bill on additional tax incentives for electromobility and amendments to other tax provisions. It is basically the omnibus law to be adopted every year (previously referred to simply as the "Annual Tax Act"), which is intended to implement the legally and technically required and deemed necessary changes in tax law. Once again those changes will also include extensive amendments to the German Investment Tax Act. We have addressed the most important changes that may be of interest to you.

On July 31^st, 2019, the German federal government published its bill amending the Real Estate Transfer Tax Act. In particular, the draft contains new regulations for the long-discussed tightening of the taxation of share deals with the real estate transfer tax.

The amendments were initially introduced in the draft version of a bill to further promote the taxation of electric mobility and to amend further regulations (JStG 2019). They have now been transferred to a separate legislative procedure. The main changes in the real estate transfer tax correspond to the draft adopted by the Finance Ministerial Conference in the middle of last year (see our beinformed from July 12^th, 2018). The measures are scheduled to enter into force on January 1^st, 2020.

On May 21, 2019, the Federal Ministry of Finance published a Circular on sec. 1 - 24, sec. 50 and sec. 56 of the German Investment Tax Act (BMF May 21, 2019, BStBl. I 2019, 527). With this publication, the administrative regulations on investment funds (chapter 2), the transitional regulations and the tax withholding regulations for special investment funds (chapter 3) are now available in their final version (for the time being). The tax authorities will apply these rules to all open cases from 2018 onwards. For matters covered by these regulations, previously published BMF Circulars and written replies to associations are thus obsolete. We would like to inform you about some of those regulations that seem of particular importance.

The regulations on special investment funds (chapter 3) as outlined in the third draft of the Circular (dated June 15, 2018), however, are currently still being revised or amended and will probably not be published in their final version until the beginning of 2020.