As part of the Government’s process to continually review tax concessions to ensure relevance and usefulness, the following changes are made:
a) To ensure that the relevance of the tax concessions is periodically reviewed, a review date of 31 December 2022 will be introduced for the WHT exemptions for the following payments:
i. Payments made under cross currency swap transactions made by Singapore swap counterparties to issuers of Singapore dollar debt securities;
ii. Payments made under interest rate or currency swap transactions by financial institutions;
iii. Payments made under interest rate or currency swap transactions by MAS; and
iv. Specified payments made under securities lending or repurchase agreements by specified institutions; and
b) The following WHT exemptions will be legislated, along with a review date of 31 December 2022:
i. Interest on margin deposits paid by members of approved exchanges for transactions in futures; and
ii. Interest on margin deposits paid by members of approved exchanges for spot foreign exchange transactions (other than those involving Singapore dollar).
The change in (b) will take effect for payments under agreements entered into on or after 20 February 2018.
c) The WHT exemptions for the following payments will be withdrawn:
i. Interest from approved Asian Dollar Bonds; and
ii. Payments made under over-the-counter financial derivative transactions by companies with FSI-Derivatives Market awards that were approved on or before 19 May 2007.
The change in (c) will take effect for payments under agreements entered into on or after 1 January 2019;
Unless the WHT exemptions under (a) and (b) are extended, the WHT exemptions will cease to apply to payments that are liable to be made under agreements entered into on or after 1 January 2023. WHT exemptions will continue to apply to payments that are liable to be made on or after 1 January 2023, under
agreements entered into on or before 31 December 2022.
All other conditions of the schemes remain the same.
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