The Ministry of Finance has postponed the reform to make permanent extraordinary taxes on banking and energy. You need to do it before December 31 in order to be able to tax these large groups for the benefits reaped in this year. Initially, the Government contemplated the possibility of including the new scheme through an amendment to the transposition of the European directive that establishes a minimum tax on multinationals. However, the deadline to include corrections to this regulation has been extended for the umpteenth time, now until October 30, which allows the Executive to have a few days of margin to try to close a negotiation that has become very complex.
If this route is not possible, the Treasury would approve the measure through a royal decree law that would then have to be validated in Congress, according to sources from the department headed by María Jesús Montero. But he would still face arduous parliamentary arithmetic. It needs the support of PNV and Junts, while companies like Repsol openly pressure to try to block them. The bank simply resigns itself to trying to soften them by asking that they go against profit and not against income from interest and commissions.
These figures have to be integrated into the Spanish tax system so that the Treasury can collect them in 2025 on the income of 2024, and so on. It is an agreement reached in December of last year by PSOE and Sumarwhen the anti-crisis decree was approved, and to which the Government has also recently committed to Brussels in your tax plan. But the challenge to process them is titanic. Within the Executive, the PSOE and Sumar stage two increasingly opposing positions: while the former want to soften the design, the latter advocate maintaining it and even toughening it. Among the usual partners of the Executive, Bildu, ERC and BNG align with Sumar’s positions. But things get much more complicated with the PNV and Junts, whose votes would be essential.
According to PNV sources, the Basque group already reached an agreement in December 2023 so that banking and energy taxes would stop being taxes and become taxes. In this way, they could be assimilated by the provincial governments of the Basque Country and Navarra within their own fiscal powers, facilitating their collection and even allowing them to be subsidized. What’s more, the Treasury has already agreed with the Basque nationalists that renewable investments could be deducted from the calculation.
In an interview on RTVE, the president of the PNV, Andoni Ortuzar, called on the Government’s partners this Tuesday to be “careful” and be “reasonable” with the design of the taxes because “it is not good to kill the goose that lays the eggs.” of gold.” And he warned that it could do “a disservice to the continuity of the industrial sectors” in Euskadi, since some companies have already said that their investment plans will suffer, in clear reference to the statements that Repsol has released.
In a forum published this Tuesday in several media, the CEO of the oil company, Josu Jon Imaz, harshly attacked the “fiscal demagoguery” that would mean making the two figures permanent and assured that investment in the Spanish energy sector “will slow down minimum”, while “billions of euros will be diverted to other countries”. Repsol’s chief executive said that companies already pay corporate tax on their profits and it would be paying twice for the same thing. Imaz explained that his company has planned investments in refineries worth 10,000 million euros for the coming years and that these generate more than 200,000 direct and indirect jobs. “Fiscal populism is going to penalize this activity with a discriminatory tax that makes it impossible for this investment to be carried out,” he concluded.
These words from Imaz have also generated a stir in Catalonia, where Repsol plans to invest more than 1,000 million euros in the Tarragona chemical hub. Junts sources point out that it has not yet been determined what their vote will be and point out that the decision will probably be made public when the vote comes. The future of these levies clearly depends on Junts.
Regarding the banking tax, financial sources consider that the new situation of the sector – with falling interest rates and the moderation of interest margins – has left the arguments that justified the introduction of the rate outdated. . This idea is supported by the recent words of the Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, who pointed out that the new tax would take into account credit cycles and increases or decreases in rates.
Financial sources explain that they are trying to convince the Government that the rate stops taxing interest and commissions and is limited only to profits. They also demand special measures for loans to SMEs, so that the tax does not limit their access to credit.
A proposal that they have sent to the ministry, and which it has not accepted, is to establish a scheme similar to contributions to the Deposit Guarantee Fund, which are frozen according to the economic cycle. They also look at solutions from other European countries, such as France or Italy. In the first, they have raised a surcharge in Companies, while Rome has chosen to delay the deductions for deferred assets for two years.
All of this intersects with the review of the payment of the fee that the Treasury has carried out in recent months. The Tax Agency believes that the banks have paid the treasury less than they should for this tax and has focused on four specific aspects of bank accounts: the calculation of business abroad, commissions on insurance sales, deductions for the coupons of bonds known as cocos (those that are converted into shares when the bank capital falls from a certain level) and the computation of deferred tax assets. According to sources, this will open a new legal battle between the sector and the Government, since the banks disagree with this new criterion and plan to sign disagreement documents and go to court.
The extraordinary taxes were created to be operational in 2023 and 2024—acting on the income of 2022 and 2023—, under the figure of non-tax property benefits. This allowed the Government to avoid risks such as double taxation and obtain an additional contribution from the sectors that were benefiting from the sharp rise in rates and the increase in energy prices due to the inflationary crisis. In fact, the Treasury collected more than 5.7 billion with both figures in the first two years, at a rate of almost 2.8 billion per year. Now, in the redesign being studied, the Government has to decide if it maintains this philosophy, as Sumar claims. “to combat oligopolistic behavior”or if it modifies the tax to soften it, as assessed by the Treasury and Economy, and claimed by the PNV.
