A few words about the e-Residency scheme in Estonia
If you’ve taken a look at our website, you may have noticed that Read Panda Editing seems to be quite an international company. Vittorio Mattioli is Greco-Italian, while Mike French (despite his name!) is English. But we met in Scotland and have lived in lots of places. Nowadays, Vittorio is based in Athens, Greece, while Mike is in Brussels, Belgium. How does a company work when its founders are so geographically far-flung?
Read Panda Editing is an Estonian E-Company. While the company’s directors (Vito and Mike) are based in other countries, the company itself is based in Estonia. Thanks to Estonia’s E-Residency scheme, we can do all our business remotely, hence the appeal! Everything we do is digital: no paper, no ink, all just noughts and ones (we’re probably pretty good for the environment, too). In fact, owing to the pandemic, we haven’t seen one another face-to-face for over a year!
All of this makes things pretty convenient for us, but how does it affect you, our clients? Well, it doesn’t! We are an EU company, so working with us is the same as with any other European business.
In fact, Read Panda should be particularly easy to work with. Because of our international profile, we accept payment in multiple currencies at no extra cost to the client. And while we work in English, we can communicate fluently in Greek and Italian as well (Vittorio is a trained translator – Mike isn’t contributing to this bit of our expertise yet!) and can get by in French, German and Spanish.
And one last comment to put to rest the suspicions of the more cynical amongst you: Estonian E-Residency does not result in lower taxes for us (alas!). We pay company taxes in Estonia and then personal income tax in our respective countries. Despite the millions to be made in running a small editing company (sarcasm, for those of you who were wondering), this is no tax-avoidance scheme.
So that’s us. If you hire us, you’ll notice that the billing address on our invoices is Tallinn, Estonia, despite the fact neither of us have ever been there. Welcome to the 21st century!