“The international airport of the Region of Murcia will not cost the people of Murcia a single euro,” said the president of the Region of Murcia, Fernando López Miras, in 2020, after learning that Sacyr, together with the company Aeromur, had to compensate the Community for the 182 million euros it lost due to the airport not starting up once it was built. His statements still resonate strongly today after the decision of the Superior Court of Justice to cancel the compensation because it was requested out of time.
The ruling specifies that sanctions for breach of contract must be presented within three months. The company lost the concession in 2013, but the liquidation did not take place until 2019. Added to this is the complication that the Community included two notions in the document: the amount it expected to receive, 36.3 million; and the amount reduced by the 180 million that it was claiming without taking into account the investment made by the former concessionaire, which amounted to 143.7 million. Thus, the Litigation Chamber partly agrees with Aeromur, which argued that the liquidation approved by the Murcian Department of Development and Infrastructure had expired and therefore had no legal force.
During the construction of the airport, the regional government, then chaired by Ramón Luis Valcárcel (PP), guaranteed a loan of more than 182 million euros to what was then the concessionaire of the project, Aeromur. Three years later, Valcárcel requested the suspension of all ongoing processes, considering that Aeromur had violated the contractual conditions, since the company, once the airport was completed, requested an extension of the contract to make it operational. It did so without requiring any type of guarantees or bank guarantees from the concessionaire to claim the debt of 182 million contracted by the Community. Since December 2012, the Community has had to assume the repayment of the guarantee, which will not be paid for two years.
The Murcian executive did not become aware of this debt until February 2020, when the Supreme Court forced Aeromur to pay the guarantee. After the end of the contract, the Autonomous Community launched a call for tenders for the management and operation of the airport for 25 years, ultimately choosing a single company, Aena, which won the concession and has been operating the facilities since January 2019.
Aeromur, liquidated since 2019
Even without this setback, the Community of Murcia would have been left without compensation. In 2019, the company went into liquidation and did not have the funds to meet the payment.
On February 14, following the Supreme Court ruling, a commercial report was published revealing the inability of Aeromur to meet the full payment of the million-dollar guarantee. They would not even be able to handle any administrative management: the former concessionaire has been in liquidation since April 2019 and has even declared itself insolvent.
