The principle of prohibition of abuse in EU case law is a recognised concept, which according to many enjoys the legal status of a general principle.

At the beginning, it was applied in a fundamental freedom context and then in almost every field of law not only reserved to Union competence, but also to the extensive interpretation of treaty and directive dispositions. Overtime the Court has denationalised abuse. It thus applies it in light of Union law, not national law.

2. The linguistic problem
A steady line of case law by the Court underlines a well-established prohibition of the use of Union law for abusive or fraudulent ends. It is no simple task to define the scope of that principle, as Advocate General La Pergola opined in Centros . Nor has the phraseology used by the Court been overly-coherent either; it has not always referred to the notion as “abuse”. Indeed, it has at different times used phrases such as “avoidance”, “evasion”, “circumvention”, “fraud” interchangeably with “abuse”.

Due to the mis-translation of EU documents, some minor linguistic discrepancies remain when the Court has referred to the concept of abuse. Nonetheless, after the judgment in Emsland-Stärke, “abuse” has been the only term used by the Court in referring to such situations. It can therefore be interpreted as the common denominator of the terms mentioned earlier, meaning they are merely different expressions of the same concept. How this “abuse” has been conducted can be divided into three groups, namely circumvention (or u-turn transactions), fraudulent behaviour, and misuse. The difference in form bears no practical difference in terms of applying the abuse of rights principle to a given case.

2.2 Circumvention