FCT scholarship recipient awarded Mitchell B. Carroll Prize

On December 1, the International Fiscal Association (IFA) awarded the Mitchell B. Carroll Prize to Rita Cunha, a doctoral fellow at FCT. The award ceremony, which was given in recognition of 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 national has received this award, which was created in 1948 and is awarded annually by the IFA for innovative research in the field of international taxation. Rita Cunha's doctoral thesis focuses on general anti-abuse rules, how they should be drafted to be effective in combating 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, offering an original discussion of a series 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 one of the most prestigious awards in the field of international taxation, Rita Cunha sees this distinction "as the culmination of many years of work, of an academic career that began in Portugal, with a law degree from the Catholic University, continued in New York, with an LLM (Master of Laws) at New York University School of Law, and ending in London, where I did my PhD under the supervision of Dr. Philip Baker QC and with the support of FCT."