China Law Insight : China Law Insight: China Commercial and Intellectual Property Lawyers and Attorneys, Full Service Law Firm: King & Wood

Towards year end of 2008, the PRC Government announced the repeal of the tax incentive allowing for the importation of equipment free of duty and VAT for encouraged foreign investment enterprises (FIEs). At the same time, the refund available for VAT paid on domestic equipment purchases was also repealed. This was in conjunction with the reform of the VAT system, discussed in an earlier blog on this site.

The PRC government now has issued two notices grandfathering the old VAT benefits until the middle of this year, one for the imported equipment and one for the domestic equipment.

Stephen Nelson, Partner, & Alice Zhang, Taxation

• Print
• Comments (2)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Jing Gang, Partner, and Wang Huapeng - Securities & Capital Markets Group 

1.The importance of foreign companies listing in China.

1.1 Permitting and attracting foreign enterprises to list on domestic stock exchanges is the norm on international capital markets.

From a global perspective, major securities exchanges are sparing no effort in attracting foreign enterprises to list, with foreign enterprises well represented on their lists of listed companies.

• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

As 2009 begins and the economic crisis has hit most major markets globally, the Supreme People's Court of the People’s Republic of China (“Supreme Court”) is studying how to adjust judicial policy on intellectual property rights (“IPRs”). The new policies will outline developing trends in the legal protection of IPR in China that may occur this year:

1. Increasing Compensation for Infringement on Intellectual Property Rights

Recently, the Supreme Court has stressed on various occasions that the court shall adopt flexible and practical methods to calculate the damages awarded in cases concerning infringement on IPRs in order to adequately compensate rights owners, negate illegal profits collected by the infringement, and truly raise the costs for infringement; the reasonable expenses of the right owners incurred while enforcing their lawful rights shall be reimbursed. When statutory compensation is applied, the compensation for the expenses incurred by the rights owners while enforcing their lawful rights shall be calculated separately, rather than be included in the statutory compensation. The current applicable maximum amount for statutory compensation in China is RMB 500,000（though the maximum amount has already been raised to RMB 1million in the third revised PRC Patent Law promulgated on December 27, 2008 which will come into effect on October 1, 2009）, which includes the allowance for expenses incurred. Due to the difficulty in producing evidence when seeking compensation and that the statutory compensation is non-substantial, the absence of sufficient and adequate compensation is a common problem faced by right owners. This issue could addressed in 2009.
 

Mia Qu, Bessie Ye, Nick Wang of King & Wood's Intellectual Property Group

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link