[p0la]

As a French entrepreneur, I was advised several times to move my HQ to the Netherlands because of the extremely low taxes on intellectual property. The HQ can invoice european subsidies/entities for the usage of the brand as well as the IP of internal software or patents. You calibrate this so that European subsidies makes little to no profit, so you don’t pay any local tax. Then, what amounts essentially to the profit of all your European subsidies is brought back to your NL headquarters under “revenue from intellectual property” on which you pay ~ no tax (I’ve been told around 5%). I’m not an expert in taxes and I have not looked into this in details so this may all be wrong, but it’s advice we got from top 10 EU lawyer firms. It was presented to us as a tax “optimisation” scheme.

[speleding]

There is indeed only a 5% tax on gains that can directly be attributed to innovation, which is probably what you are referring to. It's intended to give innovative companies a leg up against ones that don't innovate, and aimed to support start-ups.

This is a good idea in itself, but, of course, it's quite tricky to establish what part of profit is really owing to innovation, and several tax lawyers have found ways to abuse the scheme. By now that loophole has been mostly closed, but there will always be new ideas by politicians that will subsequently be abused, it's not really because they wanted to become a tax haven.