BERLIN: German constitutional court has ruled illegal inheritance tax breaks for family run businesses here the other day. This move threatened to strike at the heart of Europe’s largest economy.
Collectively known as the Mittelstand, about 90 per cent of German companies are family-run, employing more than half of the country’s workforce and producing half of Germany’s economic output.
The court in Karlsruhe gave them and the government until June 2016 to put their tax affairs on a new footing, however, sugaring a pill that the firms had warned would put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk.
