EU forwarders and terminal operators call on the European Commission to end the spill over effects of generous tonnage tax for shipping on other actors of the maritime logistics chain
CLECAT and FEPORT, on behalf of thousands of European freight forwarders, port companies and terminals, call on the European Commission to avoid market distortions in the EU and to unbundle the activities eligible for favorable tax treatment under tonnage tax schemes.
The call follows last week’s decision of the European Commission, clearing the Italian maritime industry state aid. The special tax regime will not only be applied to a shipping company’s core revenues from shipping activities, such as cargo and passenger transport, but equally to certain ancillary revenues that are closely connected to shipping activities.
In recent letters to Commissioner Vestager, the associations invite the EU Commissioner to clarify the state aid rules in order to avoid risks of distortion of competition and to ensure a level playing field. The associations believe the Commission should ensure that ancillary services, which are also offered by other parties in the maritime logistics supply chain, are excluded from the scope of eligibility for tonnage tax and that the decisions including those provisions are amended accordingly.
Lamia Kerdjoudj-Belkaid, Secretary General Federation of FEPORT, noted: ‘The privilege granted to the shipping companies, allowing them to benefit from preferential tax treatment for their cargo handling activities, distorts competition between integrated terminals and independent ones. We believe that it is the role of the Commission to clarify the rules to avoid risks of distortion of competition and to ensure a level playing field. This is particularly important when exceptions to the general rules on State Aid are benefiting one sector as it is the case for maritime transport.’
Nicolette van der Jagt, Director General of CLECAT, added: ‘There are now clear cases that more vertically integrated carriers can benefit from tax schemes, which provide incentives for carrier haulage (door-to-door transport arranged by the carrier) rather than merchant haulage (where door-to-door transport is arranged by the shipper or freight forwarder), which obviously is not acceptable to us.’
Whereas the Commission has noted that it “ensures that there is no spill-over of the favourable tax treatment of shipping companies into other sectors unrelated to maritime transport”, both associations have serious doubts regarding the Commission’s methodology when assessing the risks of spill over into their sectors. They therefore call on the Commission to follow the recommendations proposed by the ITF OECD report on “Maritime Subsidies” to amend the EU Maritime State Aid Guidelines and to unbundle the activities eligible for favourable tax treatment under tonnage tax schemes.
Adding to the above, FEPORT and CLECAT noted: ‘We have tried to demonstrate during the review of the Consortia Block Exemption Regulation (CBER) how a sectoral instrument can impact well beyond the beneficiary industry. Today, we express again our concern on the distortion of competition for our members by giving competitive advantages to shipping companies through generous state aid rules.’
For more information:
CLECAT (European Association for Forwarding, Transport, Logistics and Customs Services)
Mrs Nicolette van der Jagt
Director General
Email: nicolettevdjagt@clecat.org
FEPORT (Federation of European Private Port Companies and Terminals)
Mrs Lamia Kerdjoudj-Belkaid
Secretary General
Email: lamia.kerdjoudj@feport.eu