Cyclooctatetraene dianion--an artifact?

Cyclooctatetraene in its dianionic form (COT(2-)) is considered to be partially or fully aromatic due to the fact that, unlike its neutral counterpart, it adopts planar structure with CC bonds equalized. However, some authors report that this dianion is neither planar nor aromatic. Thus, we performed a detailed analysis of the COT(2-) case. The influence of several technical parameters on the result of calculations on COT(2-) was investigated. It appears from our analysis that the use of some specific level of approximation may lead to very misleading results in which the COT ring occurs in its neutral structure, in fact being neither planar nor aromatic. Additionally, our results may suggest that COT(2-) dianion is rather an artificial structure (being the result of specific basis set description) and should not occur in experimental conditions.