On 22 May 2024, the Swedish Parliament is expected to vote on a proposal to remove the requirement to retain original hard copy accounting materials. The bill, published on 29 February 2024, proposes that hard copy accounting materials, which have been duly saved digitally, no longer have to be kept in hard copy. The amendments are proposed to enter into effect on 1 July 2024.
As of 1 January 2024, the Swedish Competition Authority will have increased authority to supervise public procurements. The powers have been adopted in order to make procurement supervision more effective.
Under the new rules, the Swedish Competition Authority may now make decisions on procurement fines without having to apply for a review of the fine in court. This presupposes, however, that the procurement did not begin before 1 January 2024.
According to Article 40.1 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the national supervisory authorities in the European Economic Area shall “encourage the drawing up of codes of conduct intended to contribute to the proper application” of the GDPR. A prerequisite for codes of conduct to be prepared by Swedish associations and bodies, which represent categories of personal data controllers or processors, is that the Swedish Data Protection Authority (IMY), pursuant to Art. 41 GDPR, has to establish the requirements that will apply to their accreditation bodies, the so-called supervisory bodies, which will be responsible in monitoring compliance with the code of conduct by the controllers or processors that undertake to apply it.
Baker McKenzie’s Sanctions Blog published the alert titled Sanctions Enforcement Around the World, the Swedish Perspective on 31 May 2023. Read the article via the link here. Please also visit our Sanctions Blog for the most recent updates.
On 22 March 2023, the European Commission tabled a proposal for a Directive on substantiation and communication of explicit environmental claims.
The proposal aims to harmonize the evaluation and monitoring of voluntary environmental claims – often referred to as “green claims” – towards EU consumers and control the proliferation of public and private environmental labels. Complementing the March 2022 proposal for a Directive on empowering consumers for the green transition as a lex specialis by providing more specific requirements on the substantiation, communication and verification of green claims, it contributes to the fight against “greenwashing”.
The Swedish Parliament and Government have decided to amend the Swedish dual-use regulations in order to strengthen the control of dual-use products and technical assistance. The Swedish regulations contain supplementary provisions to EU regulation 2021/821 on dual-use items. The changes will take effect on 1 August 2022.
Baker McKenzie’s Sanctions Blog published the alert titled “Russia imposes a ban on foreign aircraft flights from 36 states” on 1 March 2022. Read the article via the link here. Please also visit our Sanctions Blog for the most recent updates.
In March 2021, the EU approved new reporting rules in a directive known as DAC7. The directive will require the operators of online platforms for the sale of goods and certain services, to collect, verify and share data on their sellers and their transactions concluded on the online platform. EU member states have until 31 December 2022 to implement DAC7 into national law. Certain platform operators will become a reporting platform and will need to start collecting and verifying data points in compliance with the DAC7 reporting requirements. The collected data points must be reported to the tax authorities of the relevant EU member state annually.
On 11 March 2021, the Court of Justice of the European Union issued its ruling in case C-812/19. The case concerned the VAT treatment of the supply of services from a head office, which was part of a VAT group in Denmark, to its branch in Sweden.
Overruling earlier precedent, the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court decided, in a ruling from 4 February 2021, that the supply of connectivity, capacity and space in a data center should not be exempt from VAT liability as letting of immovable property. The ruling aligns Swedish law with the reasoning of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) in the recent A Oy case and is positive news for the Swedish co-location and data center industry.