Rookie mistake, you should have created a company and gotten people to do it. Put everything under the company. And then the one in trouble is the company not you.
Ethics aside, you can create an NGO with three people and do a lot of stuff in it's name that you can't do as a private individual or it would be a lot more expensive to do.
If everyone did this, it would stop being a special ability of some people.
I think the "intent" ( pun not intended) for "intent" to be a moral stance was to not discourage people from trying to do good things for fear they may do something bad and get in trouble or whatever.
In an ideal world this would be good but then of course it's ripe for manipulation because it's hard to prove one's intent
Yes, that's how the trick works. Profit is revenue minus expenses. By increasing expenses, you decrease profit, and therefore tax. But it only works if you had a profit before, because the government doesn't pay you back tax when you lose money.
As a company you collect VAT from your customers and pay VAT to your suppliers.
Depending on the resulting balance, you will either give back the amount of surplus collected VAT to your country/state/whatever or you will be provided with VAT credit.
VAT collection is different from a profit tax or other taxes.
Apparently the only exception is, if your website is only used for piracy and you can see it and you do nothing about it when asked to. That's why mega, megaupload's successor, has encryption, so that the company can plausibly deny involvement with piracy, because they can't see anything on their servers.
