MARCUS

IT PROFESSIONAL from SWITZERLAND

My Fiancée (at the time – now wife) and I arrived in Amsterdam in December 2011, as I was sent from Zurich to Netherlands to head up the Account Team of a multi-national FMCG supplier based in Amstelveen. I was given my 30% ruling in December 2011 for 10 years, and moving from Switzerland to the Netherlands meant a major pay cut, and without this ruling this move would not have been possible. My wife left her successful career in Moscow to come here to be with me. 

I was granted the 30% ruling with the justification that I had been working in above market positions for my company and had set up global tools and strategies that we had the chance to now implement within the Netherlands. I was the sole person in the organization with this knowledge and experience at the level I was being recruited in the Netherlands. In 2016 I moved to another multi-national FMCG supplier based outside Eindhoven, and on re-applying my 30% was transferred to my new company as I had specific experience in the channel we work in. If I had known that my 30% ruling would be taken away from me I probably would have not made this move as there were other options possible at the time for me and my family.

But… we do not want to leave yet. All three of our wonderful children have been born in Amsterdam, and our eldest who is 5 proudly states that she is from Amsterdam. We have established ourselves here. We invested in a house in 2014 in Amstelveen. We have planned our life here in line with the ruling we received from the Dutch government, and we don’t want to go! 

If the retroactive element of the proposed law comes into practice, this will impact my family and me immediately from January 2019. Our mortgage payments will become a challenge. Keeping our daughter in International School will be difficult, and ultimately we will likely have to move, years before we planned to and before we stop adding value here.