The energy companies activate their lawyers before the transfer of taxes to the PNV: "It collides with the CJEU, the distortion would be brutal"
The lawyers of some of the largest Spanish energy companies closely analyze the political agreement between PSOE and PNV. The pact to support the investiture of Pedro Sánchez sealed with the formation led by Andoni Ortuzar includes, not only the transfer to the provincial treasuries of the minimum taxation of 15% in the corporate tax, but also returning to the scope of their execution the collection of the tax on banking and energy.
The idea of an involvement of the PNV – a party openly opposed to a tax that Ortuzar himself considers “damaged goods” – in the management of the tax has generated relief in giants such as Repsol and Iberdrola, strongly linked to the Basque territory and which, due to their structure corporate could benefit from possible deductions that could be approved at the regional level.
The euphoria has translated into anger in other companies (also within the banking sector) that, given that they store the majority of their income in other regions of the country, such as Andalusia, Madrid, Galicia or the Castiles; They would barely notice the possible adjustments made at the regional level.
“The distortion would be brutal, it would further aggravate the distortions generated by a tax that already suffers from inequity,” legal sources point out.. Lawyers have searched for antecedents likely to support the defense of energy companies in European Justice. And they have found them.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), in a ruling in October 2012 in the framework of an infringement procedure against France, declared that the French country had breached its obligations by having kept the price of electricity a “tax regionalization” that could have generated disparities between different areas of the national territory.
The aforementioned fiscal transfer would require a reformulation of the income tax, as EL MUNDO advanced at the beginning of November, since this was not approved as a tax, but as a non-tax property benefit.. The Government is already preparing the ground to alleviate this fiscal siege on financial and energy entities.. The Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, gave the green light to the future readjustment this weekend, when she admitted that, given the changes in the global energy panorama, the Executive is going to look for “the reasonable threshold to maintain the tax.” statements made only after Brussels released a report in which it recognized that electricity and oil companies no longer benefit from the “extraordinary” profits of 2022.
Legal sources close to the electric Ibex doubt, in conversations with this medium, that the Government will radically transform the tax: “Changing it now would mean recognizing that it was poorly designed at the time, something that would harm the Executive on the legal front that opened the sector for this issue”.
What they do trust on the business front is that the Treasury will execute some adjustment that will alleviate the impact of the measure on their accounts, given the pressure exerted by Europe, where they have also always opted for a tax model on profits and not on sales, like Spanish. Although the Government has begun to tone down its fiscal crusade against the large energy companies, the giants of the sector continue working on putting together their defense to win the fight against the Executive in the courts.