representatives railway they insist that there was no tax motive for their decision to move their headquarters from Spain to the Netherlands. They insist that the reason is not to save on paying taxes in Spain or to seek softer taxation in the Netherlands, and they estimate that the decision to move headquarters is a minor reduction in the tax burden of between 1% and 2%. Suspecting a clear tax motive behind Ferrovial’s decision, an international taxation expert suggests, “That may be the case now, but let’s talk in a few years.”
exempt dividends
One of the tax charms offered by the Dutch tax system is the repatriation of dividends or the tax exemption of collecting dividends, royalties or royalties. In Spain, the regime was similar until the 2021 State Budget, with the Government deciding to limit the exemption to 95% of repatriated profits from subsidiaries abroad. Therefore, in Spain, 5% of repatriated dividends are taxed as Corporate Tax. Ferrovial will be able to save on this tax by moving its headquarters (holding) to the Netherlands. An analysis by Banc Sabadell shows that the tax savings Ferrovial can achieve in this way is approximately 40 million.
‘Tax decisions’: Special tax treaties
Corporate tax is not much different between Spain and the Netherlands either. In both cases the overall rate is 25% in Spain and 25.8% in the Netherlands. Earnings of the company within and outside the Netherlands are taxed under this percentage. According to José María Peláez, a tax inspector, the main difference is that in the Netherlands the tax administration lends itself to bilateral agreements with large individual taxpayers (‘tax decisions’) which in practice can allow for broad tax exemption of benefits. State and international taxation expert. There are ‘tax decrees’ in almost all countries of the European Union, the difference from those in countries like the Netherlands or Luxembourg is that they can come to the point of tax exemption, as was revealed by the ‘luxleak’ scandal at the time. More than 300 multinational companies are involved. As a result of this scandal, the European Commission has mandated to monitor agreements that could mask covert state aid, but the truth is that, according to Peláez, there has been almost no progress: it is true heavenly taxes that have allowed aggressive tax planning to stop paying taxes not only in Europe but around the world. According to Susana Ruíz, Oxfam’s Tax Coordinator, the Netherlands has made legislative changes to curb aggressive tax practices, such as the introduction of a withholding tax at the request of the European Commission, “but we still don’t have data to know the extent of these. Some of the measures will be implemented in 2024.
dutch sandwich
The Netherlands offers taxpayers the so-called ‘Dutch sandwich’, as well as not taxing financial income from abroad and allowing special agreements with the administration to minimize taxation. According to tax inspector José María Peláez, the Dutch government allows taxpayers to transfer their tax bases to the tax haven of the Netherlands Antilles in exchange for paying a symbolic toll that may not even reach 1%. The ‘Dutch sandwich’ is complemented by the ‘double Irish’, an arrangement that allows companies based in Ireland to derive their profits from the tax haven of British Bermuda. Peláez says there are tax authorities that have come up with plans that can combine the ‘double Irish’ with the ‘Dutch sandwich’ to achieve zero taxation of profits. The OECD encourages multinational companies to make proportional payments in the countries in which they do business. column’ and ‘2. It is these practices that push initiatives like the ‘column’ to encourage initiatives and set a minimum effective tax rate of 15%. in all states.
Center of attraction for companies
With this tax regulation scheme, it is not surprising that 91 of the world’s 100 largest companies have their financial centers or main branches in the Netherlands. Having owned subsidiaries in the Netherlands for many years, Ferrovial has now decided to make a qualitative leap and reside in their parent company rather than in their own subsidiary. According to the latest Oxfam Intermón report on the presence of Spanish companies in tax havens or low tax areas, 35 Ibex companies had 88 subsidiaries in the Netherlands in 2021. reply (twenty), inditex (12), Melia Hotels (8), railwayhe (7), telephone (7), Santander (6) and BBVA (5). This does not mean that these subsidiaries are used for tax evasion, but it does make it possible to evade their payments to some extent, according to Oxfam Intermón’s analysis. The attraction of the venues by the Netherlands is so great that there have been years when 40% of foreign investment in Spain came from the Netherlands. According to Dutch government data compiled by Oxfam, the use of the Netherlands as a “bridge” region for “fictitious investment” between 2015 and 2019 meant they moved 170,000m euros in this type of structure.