I agree with your comments except I suspect this tongue in cheek comment on our political class. I suspect the reality is that writing up this type of tax legislation is exceedingly complicated and dependent on the co-operation of other jurisdictions, not that of course it is the political class that ever write this sort of stuff up, that would be the civil servants.
Actually, it’s even worse: the complex laws in certain areas – financial regulation, cross border tax, international corporate law, banking,….. are nowadays often written up or drafted by major league law firms, because the civil servants are “outside their envelope” in this matter. The more complicated it gets, the less likely a certain law covers all necessary aspects, and this has side effects nobody sees until its too late.
Which doesn’t inhibit the typical finance minister (oftentimes even less qualified for the job than the civil servants) to blame those who use their laws for ‘taking advantage of loopholes’. Or, even better, they revert to buying stolen client data from disgruntled Swiss banking employees.
PS: Not everybody with M/VP on the tail has something to hide.
No. Some of them really live and work on the Isle of Man or on the Cayman Islands (wherever these may be – if they exist at all) 
. I’ve been in the business plane business for over 25 years now and have seen all of everything. Once I managed the plane of a person (medical doctor – pillar of society so to say) which we had to take to Switzerland every time for (expensive) maintenance because he found no other way to spend the money he had hidden there. It would probably have been better to pay some tax on it and do the maintenance in Germany at half price and without the need of those empty flights and shuttling the pilots back and forward. But when they see a chance to “save” taxes some people switch off their brain.
EuroFlyer wrote:
Actually, it’s even worse:
Yes, but on a point of order that isnt what you said, or, at least the impression you gave. The point was much of the legislation we have, whoever is drafting it, and I agree often very competent lawyers, is very difficult to get right, and so the problems arise not so much because the legislation is poor, but because it is so difficult to get “right”.
We have yet to find a better way and many of the “problems” arise because other countries dont want to co-operate for various reasons.
Although we are still “responsible” for much of “our” tax legislation in the UK, Brexit will present yet another challenge. It will be interesting to see how the cross Europe VAT arrangements with the UK pan out.
And I thought paying the least amount of tax possible while staying within the law was smart and good business practice ;-)
I fly a G-Reg plane too, simply because it was already registered there, like Alexis I am a little worried about what happens post Brexit.
Peter wrote:
Why the battery?
Batteries are Chat. IV items in Cirrus and most other OEM glass panel planes.
dublinpilot wrote:
The second is to do with infrastructure. Because airports don’t get anything like FAA funding, there are much fewer of them. In the US, it seems like every little village has its own airfield, so getting to your client by aircraft is easy. But in Europe, that isn’t the case, and often getting to the nearest airport just leaves you in the middle of nowhere, trying to figure out how to get to your client from an area without public transport, without car hire facilities, and maybe 30-50km away. It becomes easier to get there by car.
Great answer and just one of the main reasons. I
n addition, Commercial Flights are SOOO cheap here inEurope its not worth the effort to go GA. Plus there are thousands of airfields (grass) in Europe but few Instrument available airports. The ones that do are more than likely available to Commercial traffic so people take them instead. My girlfriend cant understand why I fly R/T from LHTL to EDMA costing 1500 Euros with gas making up 700 Euros of that number. when I can fly Lufthansa for 225 Euros. I tell her Im just reinforcing the EU economy.
Rail is convenient alternative between cities and much cheaper than a GA flight.
I cleaned up the thread because the discussion was about to go off the rails.
Keep it on topic.
Peter wrote:
I cleaned up the thread because the discussion was about to go off the rails.
But I think that off-topic bit might have answered to some extent the question asked by the thread starter. At least for some countries.
It descended into a fairly standard Switzerland v. Germany (or Switzerland v. Anybody if others got stuck in) tax avoidance / tax evasion debate. We all have our views on that. I have views on it too 
It got to the point of a good contributor talking about leaving EuroGA.
So let’s put that one to bed…
IMO C210 really said it all. Besides, entrepreneurs wouldn’t be entrepreneurs if GA did have an advantage, and they still wouldn’t fly GA. They would be out of business. It’s self evident really.
No, GA today is much more of a recreation and sport thing than many GA pilots dare to admit. It’s value in business is minimal. It’s perfectly doable to combine business and pleasure though
