Registering social.coop as a legal entity under Maltese law. Pros and cons.
Michele Kipiel
Public
Seen by 402
Hi all,
in the light of the planned expansion of offered services, I took the liberty to reach out to the Malta Cooperative Federation ( http://maltacooperativefederation.coop/ ) to inquire about the pros and cons of registering a cooperative on the island. Below are the most relavant information I gathered during the meeting I attended with the president and the chief accountant of the federation earlier today.
Legal requirements
- According to Maltese law, cooperatives need to have a stated "business model" (ie. a demonstrable income stream).
This can be solved by presenting our membership fee as a subscription.
- Cooperatives registered in Malta are expected to contribute to the Cooperative Solidarity Fund with a mandatory donation worth 5% of the surplus monetary reserves left at the end of each year
- Each cooperative is expected to inform the Government yearly concerning the number and the identity of the new memebers acquired during the previous 12 months
Pros
- Cooperatives registered in Malta are granted the exempt tax status if they do not pay any dividend (ie. if the surplus monetary reserves are not paid out to the members a the end of each year)
- Payments made among the cooperative's own members are never taxable (ie. paying members for their efforts doesn't count as "paying dividends")
- The Cooperative Solidarity Fund helps emerging cooperatives with loans, investments etc..
Cons
- Non-EU citizens will need to be scrutinized by the government (ie. will need to provide actual documents or whatever the government sees fit), but the procedure technically does not exist since none of the cooperatives registered so far has non-EU members.
- EU citizens will need to provide just an ID card number
Additional info
- ICA principles are protected by law in Malta, as stated in the latest legislation on cooperatives approved in 2000
- The legislation does not differentiate cooperatives by type which makes it easier for social.coop to be registered
Feel free to ask questions and comment on the above, as the information I asked for is very high level and I might have missed something relevant. I'd love to see the largest number of members possible taking part in this discussion, as this is a potentially very important step forward for us all.
Looking forward to your comments!
Darren Sat 10 Feb 2018 8:06PM
I don't see anything wrong with the current model. We can work within this. In previous co-ops I've made a stand against unnecessary incorporation. Think there needs to be clear benefits to balance the extra work and expense involved.
Nathan Schneider Sat 10 Feb 2018 10:09PM
Our scale seems to be working for the most part, but we need to professionalize some aspects of the process and pay people appropriately to do so.
Nick S Fri 16 Feb 2018 10:03AM
Essentially I voted "working for me" because the issues, if any, are opaque to me. What might be constructive would be to compile a list of perceived issues the proposed change aims to resolve, labelled "essential", "nice to have", "optional"?
Matthew Cropp Mon 12 Feb 2018 3:51AM
Interesting - I noticed their "community" maxes out at 1k members, so we might need something a little custom (for onboarding too), but that looks like it might meet our needs (and budget in a sustainable way). Would probably be worth setting up a call. Do you know about these guys, @mayel and @victormatekole?
Erik Moeller Wed 14 Feb 2018 11:16PM
I'll just note that they run mastodon.social, which is the largest non-Japanese instance (Japan has the largest instances in part because Pixiv, a DeviantArt like site, promotes its own Mastodon instance).
Of course giving up self-hosting would bottleneck any custom improvements on the service provider and may make it harder to configure additional services.
Neil - @[email protected] Sun 11 Feb 2018 10:25PM
I'll abstain from voting as I don't know enough of the practicalities to say one way or the other, but I appreciate the discussion!
Kevin Flanagan Fri 23 Feb 2018 3:39PM
Hey @samtoland can you share links for documentation on the 'current model'
Sam Toland Sat 24 Feb 2018 1:22PM
@mattcropp / @ntnsndr what's the best way to share these docs... Are they on the wiki?
Kevin Flanagan Sat 24 Feb 2018 8:27PM
There's a wiki?
Erik Moeller · Fri 9 Feb 2018 7:19PM
Sam, I agree with your assessment. I think our top priority right now should be reliability of the existing service, not tweaking the organizational model. We are two releases behind, have production DB issues we still haven't fully resolved, and have had significant service outages. In addition, new member applications have sometimes been backlogged for weeks.
Training up more technical volunteers is probably the best way to deal with this (I have been on one call so far, but I don't have access to the server so I can't help). If the self-hosting is not something we can keep doing reliably, we should switch to a paid host like https://maastodon.net/ . Service reliability is the number 1 issue that could cause this project to fail at this stage.