In November, the Borgarting Court of Appeal ruled in the legal dispute between Petter Stordalen and the Swedish Tax Agency.
Stordalen lost the case, and was sentenced to fork out NOK 400 million. In addition, all future dividends from Strawberry Fields must be taxed.
– Stordalen has completely lost the case, said the 50-page long and unanimous judgment from the Borgarting Court of Appeal.
Stordalen’s lawyer Kaare Andreas Shetelig stated afterwards to Dagbladet that his client was disappointed with the result and disagreed with the Court of Appeal.
Now Stordalen has decided to appeal the verdict to the Supreme Court, Shetelig confirms to E24.
– The questions in the case matter to far more people than Stordalen, and he is therefore asking the Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeal’s judgment, he says.
This is the background
The background to the case is that Stordalen has withdrawn NOK 795 million in dividends from the company Oslo Properties, now Strawberry Fields, which he bought in 2013.
The former owners had invested a total of NOK 3 billion in equity capital in the years from the company’s founding until it was sold to Stordalen.
From a tax point of view, the case concerns the “validity of tax rulings on cut-through”.
Normally, you should be able to withdraw the paid-in capital without paying tax, but not if the purpose of buying the company was to save tax. That is precisely what the Tax Agency believes was Stordalen’s intention, and they demanded 228 million from him.
Several rounds of court
Stordalen refused, and he took the case to the Oslo District Court. When the case was dealt with there in March 2024, the Tax Agency argued that the motivation for the hotel king’s purchase was primarily what is called the “tax position of paid-in capital”.
This could potentially open up tax-free payments of dividends of NOK 3 billion.
Stordalen lost in the district court, which concluded that the acquisition was “almost exclusively tax-motivated”. However, the tax claim was reduced somewhat, to NOK 184 million.
Both parties appealed the case, and the case was heard in the Borgarting Court of Appeal in October, where seven court days were set aside for the hearing.
