Dirk,
I hate to bring bad news but very recently these dodgy employment practices have been investigated by professionals connected to the associations and to the labor courts.
By the way I think one of the above setups, the Maltese one, has been specifically looked into by professionals (not accountants but lawyers and labor experts).
What you say about the difficulty of having multiple bases across Europe with different tax,social and contract issues is what FR is claiming and making you believe but in fact our direct competitor Easyjet does just that with extreme ease.
Under the Italian legislation pilots are not self employed nor can be directors of companies that perform as pilots for a third party but , as you also mentioned, they are employees.
Now the question is: whose employees are they?According to you and BRK/FR they are eventually employees of all those different companies/LTDs that BRK forced them to set up across the EU.
Well according to the experts that is not true for various reasons linked to bits of the Italian legislation dealing with contract workers who cannot be subcontracted to a third party company for such long periods of time as per the BRK/Strm contracts (5 years), making them in fact FR employees.
Another huge problem, even if it was possible to subcontract workers for such long periods of time, is the fact that contract agencies are a highly regulated sector in Italy and must be officially registered as such making any "foreign" company not complying with the above national laws an illegal business on Italian turf.This also brings in another threat for those,like you, who operate in Italy through foreign companies: sanctions for the company itself , therefore you.
Let's say now then your Maltese company was to comply with the above regulations and was registered in Italy as a contract agency , well now it would have to hire you locally therefore with a local contract in order to be fully compliant.
This is just an overview of the briefing that was given by these professionals.