The Tax Law Boundary of Cross-Border Corporate Organisation within the European Union between Freedom of Establishment and Anti-Abuse Rules

This thesis examines the tax-law boundary governing cross-border corporate organisation within the European Union, focusing on the relationship between freedom of establishment and anti-abuse rules. Corporate relocation, and in particular the cross-border restructuring of the corporate seat, is treated not as an isolated company-law event, but as a central manifestation of a broader phenomenon in which business organisation becomes legally and fiscally decisive within the internal market. In this context, issues of tax residence, allocation of taxing powers, access to directive and treaty-based protection, the fiscal treatment of cross-border profit flows, and anti-abuse scrutiny converge. The thesis argues that cross-border corporate organisation, including corporate relocation, cannot be treated either as inherently abusive or as automatically protected by EU law. Its legal and tax treatment depends instead on the interaction between freedom of establishment, tax coordination, and anti-abuse control within the Union framework. The research is primarily EU-centred and adopts a multi-level inquiry combining EU primary law, the judicial development of abuse of law, secondary legislation, treaty-based coordination, and the Italian perspective as a relevant national point of reference. It reconstructs a problem often examined through separate doctrinal lenses as a unitary boundary question, showing that the protection and limitation of cross-border corporate structures cannot be fully understood at a single normative level. The resulting framework is then tested through four case studies concerning fictitious foreign residence, cross-border mergers, the denial of directive-based benefits, and the limits that EU law places on domestic taxation of cross-border profit distributions. The thesis concludes that the tax treatment of cross-border corporate organisation within the European Union, including corporate relocation, is governed not by a simple contrast between legitimate cross-border organisation and prohibited abuse, but by a multi-level and context-sensitive legal discipline. What ultimately proves decisive is not form alone, but whether both the cross-border structure and the national response directed against it remain consistent with the economic reality, genuineness, rationale, and limits required by the applicable EU legal framework.