| This sentence is wrong "The change was made because EU wants to get more money from transactions for American companies – or to force them to move more operations to EU to get VAT reductions." and it can be understood by just comparing the table right above, where you can see that for an American company based in the US (last three Non-EU rows) nothing will change, so no American company would be forced to move to EU. What's true, on the other hand, is that this law would not allow some companies, including some big American ones (like Amazon) to take advantage of putting their European HQ in countries with lower VAT rate, like Luxembourg (15% til this year[1]), and so selling (invoicing) products to endusers for a lower price. Same can be said for right after about this exact part "a perfectly legal strategy to pay less taxes". VAT is not paid by the company but by the private user that buys the product/service. So they didn't pay less taxes thanks to this, but probably sold more product.
If we want to discuss about saving taxes, we can discuss about tax rulings for this companies, though... I am not a fiscal/economic guy but this girl got it all wrong...so I stopped reading at this point. [1] due to this law, Luxembourg will raise its VAT from 15% to 17% trying to compensate the money loss caused by this change (afaik it won't be enough) |