Tangential question for third-country nationals in Berlin (like me right now): Does the Berlin immigration office readily give EU Blue Cards to people in that arrangement, or do they say it's really a form of self-employment because you own the company you're working for? And do the public health insurance funds treat this as employment or self-employment for purposes of qualifying for public health insurance, for people who don't yet have that?
Of course, the immigration question wouldn't matter for other immigration situations like holding German or EU citizenship, German permanent residence or EU long-term permanent residence, family reunification permits, or anyone who actually gets explicit approval to be self-employed. And the health insurance question wouldn't matter for people switching from employment (with public health insurance) to self-employment.
The freelance visa requires a local economic interest (a reason to live here), usually in the form of German customers. There is nothing mentioned about where the company is registered and it should not matter.
Practically though, the immigration office's bureaucrats are by definition as far removed from entrepreneurship as they can be, and might struggle to reconcile the documents you have with the list of documents they are told to ask for.
Understood, yeah. (And thanks for your site, I've consulted it several times!) The rules I was asking about were the EU Blue Card rules and the rules for getting into public health insurance (GKV) without previously having such coverage within the EU.
My impression is that working for a company one substantially owns or controls, regardless of where it is registered, can lead to them deciding that it's self-employment and disqualifying a third-country national from using that work as the basis for an EU Blue Card or GKV.
Also, the rules for obtaining an EU Blue Card (or a skilled worker permit) require the employer to have a place of business in Germany, and that might be hard to demonstrate when the only tie to Germany is the location of the applicant. No idea if just renting a German office address for the business would suffice. At least Americans, Canadians, and other §41 AufenthV Abs 1 nationalities can bypass this obstacle with the §26 BeschV permit instead, with some extra approval and priority check paperwork. But this doesn't help with the issues in the previous paragraph of potentially being viewed as self-employment for immigration and insurance purposes.
Of course, the immigration question wouldn't matter for other immigration situations like holding German or EU citizenship, German permanent residence or EU long-term permanent residence, family reunification permits, or anyone who actually gets explicit approval to be self-employed. And the health insurance question wouldn't matter for people switching from employment (with public health insurance) to self-employment.