Repsol will install a renewable hydrogen plant in Portugalthus making good on its threat to withdraw investments from Spain if the government maintains the tax on energy companies. Sources at the Spanish oil company confirmed the move and said the company had already warned that “if there is not a stable tax and regulatory environment, investments in Spain will cease.”
Thus, Repsol emphasizes that this is a “direct consequence of the fact that the The government wants to maintain the tax on energy companies“, and they defend that “it is more appropriate” to settle in Portugal, because “there is no this tax”. In addition, the Spanish oil company also warned that “they are also committed for the future the 3 billion of euros from the strategic investment plan if the Government maintains its desire to make the tax sustainable.
This decision comes just days after the Government made a commitment to Brussels to maintain privileges “permanently” extraordinary taxes on the banking sector and on energy, which involves converting them into taxes. It was the Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, who stressed that the structural budget plan “obviously implies the extension or permanence of taxes” on electricity companies and the financial sector, initially approved for two years and , later extended to an additional year.
The permanence of these two privileges – which They raised 2.859 million this year– has already been agreed with Sumar as part of the investiture agreement, and consists of converting them into taxes through a law, a process that has not yet started, making it difficult to conclude before the end of the year. Thus, to prevent temporary levies from decreasing at the end of the year, the government could choose to extend them until the laws converting them into taxes are approved.
Faced with this situation, Repsol decided to invest outside our country, just one year after its president, Antonio Brufau, warned that if there was no “legal and fiscal stability” in Spain , the investments of 1.5 billion euros that the energy company planned to make in the country to promote renewable hydrogen They would go to “Portugal or France”. In this sense, Brufau assured that Repsol’s 1.5 billion euros investment was “subject to what we call stability: legal stability and fiscal stability”.
Brufau thus raised his voice taking into account the notice of the Government’s agreement to extend the tax especially for energy and banking companies, and threatened that if Spain had a tax according to which “the French or the Portuguese are not obliged to produce hydrogen”, the company’s decision will surely be “d ‘go to Portugal or France’. However, taking into account that the Macron government announced this year that it was studying increasing the tax on windfall profits of energy companies, the Spanish oil company ultimately chose to install the renewable hydrogen plant in the country chaired by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. .
