Chapter MGETR50050
| Published date | 29 January 2018 |
| Record Number | MGETR50050 |
| Court | HM Revenue & Customs |
Museums and Galleries Exhibition Tax Relief (MGETR) is a State aid. A State aid is defined in Article 107(1) Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union as:
‘any aid granted by a Member State or through State resources in any form whatsoever which distorts or threatens to distort competition by favouring certain undertakings or the production of certain goods’. Any such aid ’shall, in so far as it affects trade between Member States, be incompatible with the internal market.’
The Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) provides further guidance on State aids.
Any Museums and Galleries Exhibition Production Company (MGEPC) must adhere to the rules in the General Block Exemption (GBER) (Commission Regulation (EU) No 651/2014 of 17 June 2014) which came into force as of 1 July 2014. For State aid purposes the total amount of any exhibition tax credits for each undertaking must not exceed 75 million euros per year. ‘Undertaking’ must be interpreted within the context of the GBER in force.
State aid intensity and Cumulation
A MGEPC must consider whether it has received other forms of aid from other sources as these must be ‘cumulated’ to arrive at the intensity figure.
Cumulation means that you must add up any State aid received from more than one source going to the same project (in this case, an exhibition). Normally, you cannot receive more than one aid payment for the same action.
For example, if you have a notified State aid tax benefit which you use to increase investment in a new exhibition, you could not normally then claim a grant from another Government Department for work on the same display.
Other forms of State aid may include: grants, direct payments, tax reliefs, tax exemptions, or any aid by a state or through its own resources. This list is not exhaustive and companies should determine whether any payments, grants etc. they receive are State aids which may need to be taken into account when determining whether the exhibition has reached an intensity level. The intensity level is the maximum amount of State aid that a project is permitted to receive in relation to the budget, after cumulation from all sources.
Each MGEPC must ensure that it does not exceed the prescribed State aid intensity levels set out in the GBER in force. ‘Intensity’ means the total amount of aid received for the exhibition. Breaching the limit may mean that any State aid given in excess of the...
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