Your responsibilities and how FLYN-YACHTING can help you
As shipowner, captain or appointed agent, you carry permanent or temporary responsibilities. FLYN-YACHTING lightens that load with verified, probative documents.
Your responsibilities as a yachting professional
As shipowner or captain, you are, globally, responsible for the management of the yacht in port and at sea, and for general compliance (qualification, training, documentation, and all rules of certification and international navigation). The same applies to the administrative aspects in the fiscal, customs, social and environmental fields. You can delegate certain responsibilities through a yacht management mandate, regarding the yacht herself but also the commercial operations for charter or passenger transport.
As the shipowner’s agent (central agent, charter, stakeholder, tax representative…) or as captain, you have permanent or temporary duties and responsibilities including:
- Day-to-day implementation of multiple tax rules, opportunities for exemption, and transparency obligations
- Customs monitoring of tax-free fuels (fuel logbook) and year-end report
- Filing of compliant accounting at year-end
- Filing of an international commercial navigation report (70% threshold)
- Presentation of a VAT exemption certificate (ports, provisioning, shipyards…)
- Declarations of entry into territorial waters, of intended anchorage or stop, of pilotage; associated health, port and customs rules
The FLYN-YACHTING suite of products and services can help you lighten your workload by relying, in meeting these obligations, on verified and probative documents demonstrating your compliance to the administrations, either a priori or a posteriori. All you need to do is integrate these elements into the management of commercial contracts (VAT & TICPE), into annual declarations (70%, fuel), or more simply into the on-board archives.
How does FLYN-YACHTING work?
FLYN-YACHTING relies on the position information provided by the yacht’s AIS, which is irrefutable data accepted by the national authorities. FLYN-YACHTING has a large database of maritime borders, ports, shipyards and anchorages in the Mediterranean, administrative and maritime areas at sub-regional level, and geomatic processing programs developed in-house.
FLYN-YACHTING can therefore analyse the dynamic situation of a yacht (en route / in port / at the yard / at anchorage), the area where it is located (territorial waters of a country, region, department) and, for some countries, the applicable environmental and nautical regulations (forbidden or regulated anchorage).
This analysis over time makes it possible to verify status, for example compliance with the duration since temporary admission to the EU (18 months), the length of stay of a crew member with regard to their social status (6 months), the times or distances travelled during commercial operations (VAT calculation for Charter or Transport), compliance with anchoring restrictions (environmental protection), etc.
For yachts not equipped with AIS, it is recommended to provide a continuous record of GPS navigation and relevant extracts from the navigation log.
Associating your business data with the yacht’s itinerary
Transport agreement
With regard to navigation under a transport agreement, the opportunities for tax exemption are significant, and notably:
- International shipping routes, if they reach a port in a different country from the country of departure (exempt)
- Passenger transport between Corsica and mainland France (exempt)
- Sailing quota in international waters (exempted) and modulation of the VAT rate (Corsica: 2.1% instead of 10%)
- In addition to the access, to be justified, to a fuel free of TICPE and VAT
The VAT calculation report offered by FLYN-YACHTING deals with these different cases, calculates and justifies the tax status of each travel leg thus determined, up to the final invoice wording. For this purpose, the captain, in exchange with FLYN’s experts, must specify during the cruise the nature of each stopover, according to whether it is a simple navigation stop at anchor, a transit stopover with local commercial exchange, or a stopover with passenger embarkation or disembarkation. These elements (and their supporting evidence) make it possible to justify partial or total tax exemptions.
Charter agreement
With regard to charter navigation, the situation is in fact much simpler (departure from France or Italy) from 2021: only the time spent in non-European waters is exempt with regard to the total duration of the charter. The VAT exemption is then limited, but independent of the types of stopovers and passenger movements, which only change the routes qualifying for the 70% threshold of international commercial navigation. FLYN-YACHTING’s reports analyse and take these different situations into account and provide you with a detailed and conclusive report.
Need for localisation & cumulative treatment
FLYN-YACHTING’s products and services follow the variation of regulations with regard to the navigation and stays of the yacht in the visited territories. In addition to the yacht’s positions over time (mainly taken from the AIS), FLYN-YACHTING processes international or non-EU sailing crossings (VAT exempt), calculates elapsed times or distances travelled, and determines the beginning and end of events such as change of territorial waters, end of a call, entry into port, anchorage, etc.
Associating these events with the applicable regulations makes it possible to determine situations such as:
- 1 Is the yacht anchored in an authorised area?
- 2 Has the yacht exceeded the stationing-time threshold, modifying the temporary import status? Or the social status of the crew?
- 3 Has the yacht reached 70% international commercial navigation?
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