Transfer Pricing in Greece

The legal framework

Greek transfer pricing rests on Article 50 of the Income Tax Code (Law 4172/2013), which requires profits between associated persons to reflect the terms independent enterprises would have agreed and allows any shortfall to be added back to taxable income. Article 51 extends the same test to business restructurings and transfers of functions. The compliance machinery sits in the Tax Procedure Code, recodified as Law 5104/2024 with effect from its publication on 19 April 2024: documentation in Article 25, advance pricing agreements in Article 26, penalties in Articles 55 and 56. The renumbering matters in practice — much of the commentary and many audit files still cite Articles 21, 22 and 56 of the former Law 4174/2013, and misciting the current code is an easy way to look a step behind the auditor.

Association is cast wide. Article 2(g) ITC captures direct or indirect participation of at least 33% in capital, voting rights or profit rights, but also any relationship of substantial management dependency or decisive influence, including through a common third person — a limb that reaches arrangements a pure shareholding test would miss. The OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines are not enacted as law, yet the Greek provisions are applied and interpreted consistently with them in audits, MAP and APA procedures alike; Decision POL 1097/2014 refers dynamically to the Guidelines as updated over time. Administration lies with the Independent Authority for Public Revenue (AADE), autonomous since 2017. One structural quirk deserves attention: domestic guidance on permanent establishments follows the 2010 Authorised OECD Approach, while Greece's 34 pre-2010 Article 7 treaties do not — attribution outcomes can therefore differ by treaty partner.

Methods, comparables and benchmarking

All five OECD methods are available — CUP, resale price, cost plus, TNMM and profit split — with no domestic additions (Decision POL 1097/2014, as amended by POL 1144/2014). Selection follows the most-appropriate-method standard, but Greece states a preference for the traditional transaction methods where they can be applied reliably, relegating the profit methods to cases where comparable data is absent or thin. There is no bespoke guidance for commodities, intangibles, services or financial transactions; each is priced under the general rules read through the OECD Guidelines, with commodity dealings following paragraphs 2.18-2.22 of the TPG and no hard-to-value-intangibles regime at all.

Benchmarking practice is settled. Where a method yields a range, the bottom and top quartiles are discarded and any point within the interquartile range is arm's length — provided the choice of point is justified, a condition Greek courts now actively police: decisions in 2024-2025 have accepted median-of-IQR adjustments and the Berry ratio as an alternative profit level indicator. There is no preference for domestic comparables, secret comparables are barred, and courts have accepted Balkan regional sets where Greek ones run out (Thessaloniki Court of Appeals 365/2025). Under the 2015 circular, CUP data should be contemporaneous with the transaction while margin methods use a weighted average of the three preceding years; comparability adjustments are permitted but never compulsory.

Documentation: what AADE expects

The Greek package is a Master File and Greek Documentation File aligned with Annexes I and II to Chapter V of the Guidelines, plus the Summary Information Table (SIT) — Greece's disclosure vehicle, filed electronically via myAADE, since there is no separate transfer pricing return. Exemption thresholds are turnover-linked: no documentation is due where aggregate intercompany transactions do not exceed EUR 100,000 per year (turnover up to EUR 5 million) or EUR 200,000 (turnover above EUR 5 million); once the threshold is crossed, every related-party transaction must be documented regardless of size. Individuals — including sole traders — and tax-exempt entities sit outside the obligation altogether, as do Law 89/1967 shared-services offices, which operate on a pre-approved cost-plus mark-up of at least 5%.

Timing follows a genuinely contemporaneous standard: the file must exist by the income tax return deadline (the last day of the sixth month after year end), with the SIT e-filed by the same date. The file stays at the taxpayer's seat and must reach AADE within 30 days of a request — a window that punishes documentation drafted retrospectively. Everything is in Greek except a foreign group's Master File, which may be kept in English with a Greek translation due within 30 days of demand. CbC reporting applies above EUR 750 million of consolidated revenue, due 12 months after year end with notifications by the final day of the fiscal year (Law 4484/2017; Decision POL 1184/2017).

Audits, penalties and the enforcement climate

Greek penalties are fixed, layered and escalate quickly. The SIT attracts 1/1000 of documentable transaction values — floored at EUR 500 and capped at EUR 2,000 for late or inaccurate filing, and EUR 2,500 to EUR 10,000 for non-filing — subject to materiality gates (inaccuracy exceeding 10% of documentable transactions; amendments shifting values by more than EUR 200,000). Producing the Documentation File late costs EUR 5,000 (days 31-60 after the request), EUR 10,000 (days 61-90) or EUR 20,000 (later or never). A repeat violation within five years doubles the fine; any further repetition quadruples it. CbC failures cost EUR 20,000 for non-filing and EUR 10,000 for late or inaccurate reports (Law 5104/2024, Articles 55-56).

There is no transfer-pricing-specific adjustment penalty; assessments carry the general accuracy penalties of 10%, 25% or 50% of the additional tax depending on the understatement band, plus late-payment interest — and compliant documentation, while it eliminates the fixed fines, does not formally shield against these. Assessments may generally issue within five years from the end of the year in which the filing deadline expired, extendable by one year and to ten where no return was filed. Enforcement is real: audits sit with AADE — large taxpayers, since the February 2025 merger of KEMEEP and KEFOMEP, with the Large Taxpayers Audit Centre (KEMEF) — and the audit product has grown markedly more sophisticated. The 2024-2025 case law cuts both ways — courts have upheld method substitutions against taxpayers, but have also forced the authority to prove the functional comparability of its own samples.

Dispute resolution and advance certainty

A transfer pricing assessment cannot go straight to court. The taxpayer must first lodge a quasi-judicial administrative appeal with AADE's Dispute Resolution Directorate within 30 days of notification (60 for taxpayers abroad); the Directorate has 120 days to decide, silence counting as tacit rejection, after which the route runs through the administrative courts to the Council of State. MAP is available under Greece's treaties, the EU Arbitration Convention and the Tax Dispute Resolution Directive (2017/1852), transposed by Articles 21-48 of Law 4714/2020 — and may run in parallel with domestic litigation, an option worth preserving in every cross-border adjustment.

Advance certainty comes through APAs — unilateral, bilateral and multilateral — under Article 26 of Law 5104/2024, with procedure reset by Decision A.1107/2023: fees of EUR 1,000 for pre-consultation, EUR 5,000 per application and EUR 10,000 per foreign state; a unilateral decision due within 18 months (extendable to 36); a maximum four-year term; bilateral rollback to open, unaudited years; and an annual compliance report due within 90 days of the return deadline, on pain of termination. Covered transactions are relieved from documentation. On adjustments the framework is asymmetric: no unilateral downward corresponding adjustment is available without MAP, and there are no OECD-style secondary adjustments — though since Law 4972/2022 the domestic counterparty to a purely domestic primary adjustment may file an amending return within three months of the audit report. Year-end true-ups are permitted where they land at arm's length.

Pillar Two and what changes in 2026

Pillar Two arrived by Law 5100/2024, transposing Directive (EU) 2022/2523: a 15% minimum rate for groups above EUR 750 million, with the income inclusion rule and a qualified domestic minimum top-up tax effective for fiscal years starting on or after 31 December 2023, the UTPR a year later, and the transitional CbCR safe harbour available. AADE issued constituent-entity notification and registration guidance in early 2026, so Greek entities of in-scope groups now carry live filing duties — and CbC data quality has become dual-purpose, feeding both the transfer pricing risk screen and the safe-harbour computation.

Two further 2026 markers: public country-by-country reporting under Law 5066/2023 applies to financial years starting after 22 June 2024, with first publications due by end-2026 and penalties of EUR 10,000 to EUR 100,000; and Amount B remains under consideration — Greece has neither adopted nor rejected the simplified approach for baseline distribution, but has committed to respecting outcomes where covered jurisdictions apply it.

How practitioners should respond

Three disciplines follow from the Greek design. First, treat the compliance calendar as the risk driver: the contemporaneous preparation deadline, same-day SIT filing and 30-day production window leave no room for post-audit drafting, and the fixed fines apply mechanically. Second, benchmark defensively — document why the chosen point in the interquartile range is justified, refresh searches on the three-year data cycle, and expect a court, not just an auditor, to test the functional comparability of the set.

Third, buy certainty where the numbers warrant it: the reformed APA procedure, with rollback and documentation relief, is materially more usable than the regime that produced Greece's first APA only in 2018, and MAP should be triggered alongside any domestic appeal of a cross-border adjustment. Groups with Greek distribution or shared-services entities should also watch Amount B and the Law 89/1967 regime, which together may reshape how routine returns are set and defended.