Brussels renews the exhortation to France and Belgium to abolish the tax exemptions for the ports



To a year from the start of a specific investigation on the tax exemptions granted to the agencies and to the societies that manage the ports of France and Belgium ( of the 8 July 2016), today the EU commission has renewed the demand to the governments of the two nations to abolish these exemptions from the tax on the societies in order to align the two national fiscal systems of the norms EU in matter of aids Is been, exhortation that at the beginning of 2016 had been revolt also to Holland, than in its turn had announced the presentation of a resource against the decision of Brussels ( on 22 January and 18 March 2016).

Remembering that recently the EU commission has introduced new rules for the investments publics in the ports and the airports ( on 17 May 2017), simplifying the procedures and meanwhile preserving the competition, Margrethe Vestager, European commissioner to the Competition, it has evidenced that meanwhile "the decisions of the Commission relatively to Belgium and France, so as that relative precedence to Holland, demonstrate clearly that the unwarrantable exemptions from the tax on the societies for the ports distort the competition".

The Commission has remembered that in Belgium such exemptions are applied for the marine and fluvial ports of Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels, Charleroi, Ghent, Liège, Namur and Ostenda and for the navigation channels of the province of Hainaut and Flanders, while in France they are in vigor in favor of the ports of Bordeaux, Dunkerque, La Rochelle, the Havre, Marseilles, Nantes-Saint-Nazaire and Rouen, for the harbour ports of call of Guadalupa, Guyana, Martinica and Réunion, for the harbour system of Paris and the ports managed from the Chambers of Commerce and of the industry.

Belgium and France have time until the end of 2017 in order to adopt the measures necessary in order to place term to such regimes of tax exemptions and in order to guarantee that from on January 1°, 2018 all the ports they are subject to the same fiscal rules applied to the other enterprises.

The EU commission has specified that, since the exemption from the tax on the societies in favor of the ports existed already before the adhesion of France and Belgium to the EU, such measures are from considering which "existing aids" and as such are not possible to ask Belgium and France to recover the aids already granted.