Pedro Sánchez keeps alive, at least in part and for 72 hours, the long-awaited tax reform that he promised the European Union and on which the next batch of European funds depends. At around 1 a.m., while the Finance Committee is in agony after eight hours of sitting and two breaks, the Government reaches a precarious agreement with half of its partners to carry out its final examination of the tax on energy companies.
On Monday evening, the Ministry of Finance committed to ERC, Bildu and BNG to extend this extraordinary tax for another year and to present it at the plenary session on Thursday. The problem is that a few weeks ago he had already agreed with Junts that this tribute would decrease. Sánchez therefore has three days to pull a rabbit out of his hat and for the Catalan sovereignists to change their minds.
The tax reform that gave so many twists and turns to the government gave birth to a chaotic and improvised Finance Commission, with exhausted negotiations, endless pauses and hordes of deputies entering and leaving meeting rooms, phones in hand. Someone asked reporters if they had a spare cell phone charger.
All this to give three more days of oxygen to a law which, as I write this article, has every chance of ending up in the drawer.
The standard which will occupy the debates in Congress this week should, at the latest, be definitively approved this Thursday in plenary in order to come into force before the end of the year and thus avoid new sanctions from Brussels. Also to obtain the fifth tranche of Next Generation European funds, which require this “tax reform”.
But this option is also not clear today. Especially because what was approved this Monday in the Finance Committee has every sign of ending up demolished on Thursday in plenary or during the next royal decree, if it is included there. Because? Because in the Commission only groups vote, but seats do not count, so a majority of parties can approve a law on Monday that overturns another majority of deputies on Thursday.
The Gordian knot in this whole affair is a bill to impose a minimum corporate tax rate of 15% on multinationals across Europe. This is the gist of the bill and, initially, there would be no major problem in moving it forward with a majority since, if it is not approved before January 1, it could be sanctions against Spain.
Taking advantage of this situation, the government wanted to make virtue a necessity and intended to use the rule as a platform for the tax reform it had promised in Brussels. Thus, thanks to cross agreements between its partners, the inauguration bloc began to include different amendments to the law (almost 140) which range from increasing taxes on tobacco to taxes on banks or tourist apartments.
Most of them fell during the interminable session on Monday, but a good part of these amendments remain in force (they will be debated on Thursday) and many others were directly pasted into the text of the opinion. In other words: if we want to pass the law and avoid European sanction, Congress will have to swallow the news ornaments of the standard.
