Recent European Union Court Cases

Abstract

This installment reports the valuation law of all twenty-seven member states of the European Union, Ireland among them, together with Norway, Switzerland and Ukraine, read for the most part in the states' own languages and checked against official texts. The first and longest part is a set of country studies of expropriation: the measure of compensation, the valuation date, the body that fixes the figure, and what the law directs be left out of account, with the decisions of the period placed inside each framework. Sweden adds a statutory twenty-five percent above market value because dispossession is involuntary, and Finland has done the same since August 2025; Norway awards the higher of sale value and use value; Denmark holds the owner to the position of an ordinary seller. France pays a reinvestment indemnity and separates the date of value from the date of reference for use; the Netherlands compensates the owner's whole damage, of which value is the first head; Spain's justiprecio is fixed by a standing jury and revised by the courts; Portugal builds the value of building land from statutory percentages that must be proved; and Italy's Constitutional Court struck a formula that averaged market value with land income. Switzerland joins compensation for planning restrictions to a levy of at least twenty percent on the value planning creates. Latvia's Constitutional Court struck a statutory land-use fee that did not cover the tax on the same land and ordered compensation. The remaining parts report decisions on taxation, lending, valuer liability, family and estate division, company and partnership shares, and insurance and diminution in value. In Germany the Bundesfinanzhof, in judgments of 12 November 2025, upheld the reformed Grundsteuer valuation; a taxpayer displaces the statutory figure by proving a common value that the figure exceeds by at least forty percent, a threshold the court's earlier case law had set and the legislature codified in 2024.