Cairn Energy Plc and Cairn UK Holdings Private Limited v The Republic of India: retroactive tax legislation when it ceases to meet the fair and equitable treatment standard
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This material was first published by Thomson Reuters, trading as Sweet & Maxwell, 5 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5AQ, in the British Tax Review as Aditya Vora, Cairn Energy Plc and Cairn UK Holdings Private Limited v The Republic of India: retroactive tax legislation when it ceases to meet the fair and equitable treatment standard, (2021) 3 British Tax Review 287 and is reproduced by agreement with the publishers. The Cairn Award concerned whether the retroactive tax amendments enacted by India to tax offshore indirect transfers (OIT) were in breach of the UK–India Bilateral Investment Treaty (UK–India BIT). OITs are transactions where shares of a foreign company or other instruments are sold overseas, where the value of the shares is substantially derived from assets situated in India. Such a transaction becomes an offshore sale of shares rather than an onshore sale of assets. The Supreme Court of India, in the case of Vodafone International Holdings B.V. v Union of India (Vodafone (SC)), held that OITs are not taxable in India on the basis of law that existed in 2012. This position was overruled by way of an amendment through the Finance Act, 2012 (IND) (2012 Amendment), making OIT transactions taxable in India with retroactive effect from 1962. This move of retroactively amending section 9(1)(i) of the Income-Tax Act, 1961 (IND) (ITA 1961 (IND)), was heavily criticised. For fear of a similar override by the Indian Parliament, remedy through investment arbitration under the relevant Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) was sought in preference to litigation in the Indian courts by various foreign investors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 0.021 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".