Ok thank you @jbossuyt,
Please keep us updated on what you decide to do.
I find this website micropreneur.life has some really good information about the subject. This guy runs a company called ‘Your Company In Estonia’ (https://yourcompanyinestonia.com) which helps e-residents with Estonian OÜ do their accountancy and compliance.
On his website I’ve read some interesting comments:
It’s important to understand that your company and you are separate entities. You can live as a person (resident) in Spain, but your company is in Estonia. It’s registered there, and let me assure you that your company pays taxes in Estonia.
Then there are your personal taxes. If you live in Spain -and run your company from there-, you are a Spanish resident and, as such, you pay your taxes there, of course.
I can affirm this with confidence, because I have had my company while being resident and living more than 6 months a year both in Spain, and my company has still paid taxes in Estonia, as it should.
If you don’t have permanent premises in your home country and try not to spend the whole year there, you should be fine.
when asking some accountants specialized in European legislation and taxation, they all agree that the requisite still applies. The tax residence needs to be generally speaking proved with a permanent residency, office or something that ties your business to a country on a permanent basis.
First of all, you need to understand what CFC rules are. CFC rules are there to prevent people from avoiding taxes by establishing companies in tax heavens. However, CFC rules are not there to forbid the establishment of companies abroad. In fact, no country can prevent a person -regardless of nationality/residence- from setting up a company in another country.
Thus, the second thing you need to understand is that Estonia is no tax heaven. It’s a reputable European country. It’s not Seychelles or the Cayman Islands, it’s not even Luxemburg or Andorra. However, it’s certainly an “entrepreneurship heaven” due to its entrepreneur friendly system, digital administration, and fair, transparent tax system.
That means that Estonia is not the target of CFC rules, on the contrary, Estonia has its own CFC rules to prevent its citizens from opening off-shore companies in tax heavens.
The tax on corporate earnings on Estonia is 20% gross (that’s 20/80 = 25%) income tax plus 33% social tax. That’s far from tax heaven. If you actually take some time to read about CFC rules in Spain, you will know that they apply if the foreign country assesses for tax at less than 75% of the sum demanded in Spain.
So, in your case, as you can see, unless taxes in Spain get A LOT higher (that might be the case soon, who knows ;), I doubt any Spanish e-Resident needs to worry about it.
The same applies to other European countries. Perhaps you need to be more careful in Germany, but then again, they need to prove that your company is generating all its value in Germany, which is not the case if you don’t have permanent premises and your services are digital/online. I know quite a bunch of German e-Residents that operate their companies without any problem.
About Belgian CFC legislation I found the following: Belgian CFC legislation will apply if the foreign company or PE is “lowly taxed”. That is the case if the foreign company’s effective local corporate tax liability is less than 50% than the amount of Belgian corporate tax that would be due if the foreign company or PE would have been subject to Belgian corporate tax.
Offcourse one can’t make decisions based on internet comments, but still could be used as guidelines