The District Court of The Hague recently ruled in a case regarding a cross-donation.
The case concerns a mother who gifted €100,000 to each of her two children in 2017. The children claimed the additional increased exemption for gifts used for their own homes (also known as the ‘jubelton’) in respect of these gifts. The following day, the children each received a gift of €100,000 from a business associate of their late father, for which the ‘jubelton’ exemption was also claimed. Their mother then gifted each of the business associate’s four children €50,000 the day after that.
The Tax and Customs Administration refuses to apply the ‘jubelton’ to the gift from the business associate, on the grounds that the ‘jubelton’ had already been applied to the earlier gift from their mother. The District Court agrees with this, because, when the case file and the proceedings at the hearing are when considered in conjunction with one another, it can be inferred that the gifts from the business associate were made solely on the assurance that the gifts would be passed on to the business associate’s four children. Consequently, according to the Court, this does not in reality constitute a gift by the business associate, but rather an (indirect) gift by the mother to her children. Unfortunately, the Court’s judgment does not specify what specific information the case file contains, nor what specific points emerged during the hearing.