Luxembourg, 24/02/2006 (Agence Europe) - The European Court of Justice has published its judgements in VAT cases involving Halifax PLC, BUPA Hospitals and Huddersfield University. It rules that the Sixth VAT Directive does not grant a taxable person any right to deduct input VAT where the transactions from which the right derives constitute an abusive practice. In a press release, the Court 'emphasised that no-one is entitled to exploit Community provisions fraudulently or abusively. That principle of the prohibition of abusive practices extends to the sphere of VAT.' English courts sent three cases to the Court of Justice, including a case involving the Halifax bank and another involving Huddersfield University, both of which wished to carry out construction work. Since most of their services were exempt from VAT, they would only have been able to recover a small proportion of VAT, but they prepared schemes enabling them, through a series of transactions involving different companies or organisations, to recover in practice all the input VAT paid in respect of the construction work. In the BUPA case, a UK private hospital company signed contracts with other companies in the same group for the future supply of drugs and prostheses. In order to benefit from a much more favourable VAT system, they arranged for the payments under those contracts to be made before delivery of the goods and before the entry into force of legislation amending the system. The applications for repayment of or relief from input VAT were rejected by the UK Commissioners of Customs & Excise and the Court of Justice has confirmed that the Commissioner were right.