FCT scholarship holder awarded with Mitchell B. Carroll Award Carroll Award

The International Congress of the IFA (International Fiscal Association) awarded last December 1st the Mitchell B. Carroll Award to Rita Cunha, FCT doctoral scholarship holder. The prize, awarded for her doctoral thesis "A New Gaar Model: Countering tax avoidance and promoting Investment through legal certainty and the Rule of Law", took place in an online session.

This is the first time that a Portuguese woman has received this award, created in 1948 and awarded annually by the IFA for an innovative piece of research in the field of international taxation. The central theme of Rita Cunha's doctoral thesis is the general anti-abuse rules, and how they should be drawn up so that they operate effectively to combat the abuse of tax law (tax avoidance) without compromising the principles of legal certainty and security, the rule of law, and economic investment and growth. The researcher states that her thesis "proposes a new approach to the drafting of general anti-abuse rules, discussing in an original way a number of controversial issues that arise in relation to the interaction of this type of rules with the principles of legal certainty and security in the context of the rule of law".

As this is one of the most prestigious awards in the area of international taxation, Rita Cunha sees this distinction "as the culmination of many years of work, of an academic path that began in Portugal, with the law course at the Catholic University, passing through New York, with the LLM (Master of Laws) at the New York University School of Law, and ended in London, where I did my PhD under the guidance of Dr. Philip Baker QC and with the support of FCT."