The statistical office of the European Commission, Eurostat, has given the government a blow for hiding a deficit at a delicate moment when the president, Pedro Sánchez, is asking for community aid against the coronavirus. Eurostat has decided to correct, after an express examination, the State deficit of 2019 and denies veracity to the 2.6% that the Ministry of Finance made official just 20 days ago.

According to the technicians of Brussels, it actually reached 2.8%, confirming that the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, not only did not lower the deficit of 2.5% in 2018 , but it raised it and with an economy that is still was in bonanza in 2019.

This setback implies that Eurotat has discovered, after a non-exhaustive examination, that the Treasury was wrong in more than 2,000 million deficits when it published the data on March 31. Already that day it was unusual that the National Statistics Institute initially stated that the deficit had been 2.7%, but it was corrected by the Treasury Intervention, which lowered it to 2.6%.

Sources from the Ministry of Finance downplay the importance of the Brussels slap and attribute it to a change in criteria in the way of accounting for Deferred Tax Assets (DTA) and by the Government's decision to expedite pending tax refunds for inject liquidity into companies in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. This newspaper already published last Monday that Eurostat would review the deficit after failing to recognize in 2019 a commitment to pay a billion to Banco Santander for tax credits taken from Banco Popular.

According to the Treasury, the modification of Eurostat occurs after the usual exchange of information between national and community institutions and frames it in the normal way. However, such a rapid correction of official data in a member state is highly unusual. Yes, there are constant Eurostat correction precedents after the months. For example, in 2018 it did not rise, but reduced the 3.1% deficit initially reported by the then Minister of Finance, Cristóbal Montoro, to 3% . The PP minister did suffer an even higher correction than Montero, also after an examination of several months in 2012 in which the upward revision was 0.24%, they recall in the Ministry.

This episode coincides with the distrust of countries such as the Netherlands and Germany with the countries of Southern Europe for claiming aid to combat the coronavirus without having done the duties of cleaning up public accounts in the bonanza stage. The Spanish economy registered growth in 2019 of 2%, above the Eurozone average, but its effort to adjust the budget was much lower.

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  • INE
  • Pedro Sánchez
  • Maria Jesus Montero
  • Christopher Montoro
  • European Comission
  • Public deficit
  • Taxes

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