María Jesús Montero, Minister of Finance and Public Function, has assured this Friday that the Government has long ruled out setting tolls and that it is flatly false that it is going to implement them.
When being interviewed on Canal Sur, the socialist minister responded to the question about the possible implementation of new tolls on Spanish highways from 2024 by the Director General of Traffic, as the Director General of Traffic, Pere Navarro, said.
Montero pointed out that Navarro “obviously is not competent in this matter and what he is in charge of is road safety.” In addition, he recalled that he himself acknowledged that he did not understand the matter or know of the Government’s plans in this regard and that the Pedro Sánchez executive has been forceful when it comes to denying it.
The also candidate for the PSOE list for Congress for Seville has stressed that the Sánchez government removed the historical toll from the AP-4, the highway that runs between Seville and Cádiz, after more than 40 years in force, as it had promised in its electoral program. She is a measure that she assures has been adopted in other parts of Spain as well, managing to liberalize about a thousand kilometers of tolls.
Montero also recalled that the socialist executive managed to rescue the radio stations for 4,000 million euros.
The European Commission indicated this Thursday that the Spanish Recovery and Resilience Plan approved by Brussels included the commitment to adopt a law on sustainable mobility and transport financing and to introduce a payment mechanism for the use of roads from 2024.
The minister has replied that “what there was was a comment within the Commission in which it was said that, indeed, at the beginning, in the year 2020, within the plans that were sent to Brussels, there was a line that had to do with the financing of road maintenance, which was not incorporated into the Sustainable Mobility Law that has been approved in the Congress of Deputies”.
