Justice The Constitutional Court annuls the municipal capital gains tax
Justice The Supreme Court cuts even more what municipalities can charge for capital gains tax so that it is not "confiscatory"
Madrid Almeida will claim 300 million from Pedro Sánchez for badly collected capital gains
The
de facto
cancellation
of
the local capital gains tax has set off the alerts in the main municipalities. After the Constitutional Court overthrew the calculation of the tax on Tuesday, mayors of the PSOE, the PP, the coalitions close to United We Can and the nationalist and independence parties have agreed to demand a quick solution from the Government, because if not their coffers they will be in danger.
They want the legislation to be amended to re-establish capital gains - but this time in a fully constitutional manner - and for the Ministry of Finance to create a fund to compensate them while they do not collect it.
This is, as EL MUNDO has learned, what the president of the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP), the socialist
Abel Caballero
, is going to ask the Government
.
"The first thing we have to do is study the sentence. Then, ask for compensation and a rule that replaces the invalid law," say sources from the FEMP.
It is something that the main opposition party, the PP, shares.
"But we also demand the urgent call of the National Commission of Local Administration [the largest conclave between the Government and municipalities], with the presence of the Ministers of Finance [María Jesús Montero] and Territorial Policy [Isabel Rodríguez], to account for this matter ", assures to this newspaper the general vice-secretary of Territorial Policy of the
popular
,
Antonio González Terol
.
The response of the Treasury
The Ministry of Finance has not been slow to respond.
"The Government, pending the full publication of the sentence, finalizes a legal draft that will guarantee the constitutionality of the tax, will offer legal security to taxpayers and certainty to municipalities," the department of Montero has assured in a statement.
This commitment is aligned with the requests of the mayors, but they also demand financial assistance to mitigate the effects of the sentence until the law is changed.
The unease is transversal among mayors.
Not so much because of the sentence, which was expected, as because of what they consider a passivity of the Executive, which could have changed the law before and has not announced it until now.
The mayor of Gerona,
Marta Madrenasa
(Junts per Catalunya), has assured this newspaper that "it must be regulated quickly and that the impact" of the ruling is greatly reduced.
"It is true that the reform could have been done earlier," he says.
"Now they will have to take quick measures. If the coup only lasts two months, we will be able to assume it," he says.
"And on the other hand we need financial compensation, because this represents a difficulty for municipalities at a time when we already needed to be better equipped," explains Madrenasa.
"They have to be immediate compensations, because the local capital gain represents more than 2% of the income and that is a lot. This cannot remain that way," he insists.
Two years without reforming the rule
The mayors of the PP are going to request an urgent meeting of the governing board of the FEMP in view of the decrease in revenue that the end of the tax means for the mayors at a critical time for the municipal coffers, after the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and still waiting for the Ministry of Finance to approve the fund against Covid that it promised them.
Jorge Azcón
, first mayor of Zaragoza, has affirmed to EL MUNDO that "in practice the municipal budgets of 2022 will have to be frozen", since the municipalities cannot do their accounts without a tax that supposes more than 2,300 million euros of annual collection.
"And it is going to impact the large municipalities more," he warns, "in a year in which the rise in energy is going to impact us a lot and already meant a strong extra cost," adds Azcón.
The mayor of Zaragoza complains that the Treasury is late: "It has been two years without reforming the regulation. This delay in the Local Finance Law is a strong blow," he emphasizes.
"The outstanding tax settlements of the last four years are probably going to have to be returned, although we have to wait for the full sentence," explains Azcón, who demands "a compensation fund in the General State Budgets of 2022" that cover local capital gains returns in advance.
"Everything will depend on the rule that the Treasury imminently makes to change the legislation. It has to be a decree, you cannot make a reform of the Local Bases Law, it is too long," he says.
Greater legal security
Sources from the Madrid City Council assure that "the capital gain is the second tax with the highest collection capacity of all those managed by the Madrid city council".
"For 2021 it is planned to collect a figure close to 500 million euros for this tribute in the city council's revenue budget."
"The lack of initiative of the Government of Spain has not only not resolved the situation, but has allowed it to worsen (...) on several occasions the Government of the nation has been demanded not to prolong its legislative inactivity in matters of capital gains and to undertake a legal reform of this tax to provide it with greater legal certainty and at the same time compensate city councils for the loss of income from this tax ", they add in the Tax Office of the consistory.
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