There’s actually a tiny exclave of Germany that is completely surrounded by Switzerland and is also not in the EU customs union, so sometimes it can happen on mainland Europe.
Heligoland is not in the customs union either, they have their own tax regime. Or rather the federation has enabled Schleswig-Holstein to give Heligoland their own tax regime: No VAT, no usual alcohol, tobacco etc taxes, instead a municipal import tax is levied without which they’d have rather empty coffers. Or at least that was the situation before the renewable boom: They were reliant on duty-free tourism, now there’s plenty offshore wind maintenance to do.
…which, thinking about it, should mean that you can produce alcohol on the island and sell it completely tax-free. And they do have a whisky distillery.
Fun fact: The island is called, in the local Frisian dialect, “deät Lun”, “the land”. A whopping 1237 people on 4.2km2.
Well I love a whisky but I’ve never had a German one. I’ll have to have a look out for it, especially if it’s gonna be a bit cheaper!
The thing about the name reminds me a little of some of Scotland’s islands. The Orkney and Shetland islands, two archipelagoes in the north, both call their biggest island “Mainland”
Heligoland is not in the customs union either, they have their own tax regime. Or rather the federation has enabled Schleswig-Holstein to give Heligoland their own tax regime: No VAT, no usual alcohol, tobacco etc taxes, instead a municipal import tax is levied without which they’d have rather empty coffers. Or at least that was the situation before the renewable boom: They were reliant on duty-free tourism, now there’s plenty offshore wind maintenance to do.
…which, thinking about it, should mean that you can produce alcohol on the island and sell it completely tax-free. And they do have a whisky distillery.
Fun fact: The island is called, in the local Frisian dialect, “deät Lun”, “the land”. A whopping 1237 people on 4.2km2.
Well I love a whisky but I’ve never had a German one. I’ll have to have a look out for it, especially if it’s gonna be a bit cheaper!
The thing about the name reminds me a little of some of Scotland’s islands. The Orkney and Shetland islands, two archipelagoes in the north, both call their biggest island “Mainland”