Rwy20 wrote:
In my very personal opinion (worth what you paid for it), if a private individual buys an aircraft in the EU from another private individual, and the plane stays based in the EU, then the seller should continue to be liable
It’s for many reasons much easier the way it is. As a taxpayer I don’t want to be paying for hundreds of tax authority employees trying to trace down ownership chains of privately held planes to figure out if the original importer paid VAT or not.
Even if people that are basically angry they can’t find a loophole do complain from time to time, current system is extremely simple: For every plane that is manufactured outside Germany there is an essential document called “Tax receipt”. You keep it next to the CoA and never touch it if you don’t sell the plane. Those “I paid tens of thousands of $$$ VAT but unfortunately lost the receipt” are just childish.
Would you also propose that the current owner doesn’t need to present the CoA because the previous owner should have had it already?
There is precedent for going after the “importer” who didn’t pay import VAT. See this thread. That was regarding the Danish zero-VAT route.
Whether they go after people who bought the plane from the previous (importing) owner isn’t clear. The alleged tax evasion was committed by the original importer, after all.
I too cannot understand why people fail to keep important paperwork, but actually a lot of apparently smart people do run their whole lives like that 
And those who want to hide something will have “lost” the papers anyway…
Peter wrote:
There is precedent for going after the “importer” who didn’t pay import VAT.
That is a different and very special thing – it was about a company (and not an individual) that actually did not pay any VAT but claimed that this is legal due to the Danish law at that time. They did not chase someone who claimed they actually paid something but could not prove it…
Malibuflyer wrote:
As a taxpayer I don’t want to be paying for hundreds of tax authority employees trying to trace down ownership chains of privately held planes to figure out if the original importer paid VAT or not.
Off topic point: Tax authority employees generally are worth their own salary several times over, if you go by the amount of otherwise “lost” taxes they collect from (attempts of) tax avoidance. It is long since known that, if the German authorities hired an appropriate number of tax authority employees, we would have a much higher tax income.
