The Madrid City Council will assume full management of the M-30 road on January 1, 2026, through the purchase of 20% of the private shareholding of the ring road, which is currently managed through a mixed model in which the municipal government holds 80%.
The M-30 has been owned by the capital’s City Council since 2004, when the Ministry of Development carried out the transfer of powers, and since then, it has been managed through a commercial company, Madrid Calle 30 S.A., which was initially 100% municipal. to later be a mixed company after the entry into the share capital of the private partner.
On Monday, in an informative meeting, the delegate of Works and Equipment, Paloma García Romero, explained that the change of model will allow an approximate saving of more than 50 million euros by eliminating the payment of VAT or corporate tax, as well as subordinated credit debt.
This figure is provisional, while the City Council is waiting for the results of a technical report prepared through a contract from the Economy, Finance and Personnel area that will also determine the cost of the operation.
Currently, the management of the M-30 is articulated around a contract related to the comprehensive management services of the highway and an agreement that regulates the maintenance and operation of the infrastructure signed by Madrid Calle 30 and the Maintenance Company y Explotación S.A. (Emesa), formed by ACS and Ferrovial.
Although the validity of the two agreements extends until 2040, the City Council can exercise an option to purchase the shares of the private partner before the end of 2025, so the operation will take place on December 31 of that year.
According to sources from the Works and Equipment area, at that time a purchase option is opened without having to compensate the private partner, due to a clause in the contract. If the absorption had been carried out before, it would have had to be paid.
The Madrid City Council is working in two ways: an administrative and “enormously long” one, in which they must close all the bureaucratic issues and the processing of the file for changing the form of management, and another of a technical nature to evaluate the conservation, investment and exploitation of Calle 30.
The new management, which must be endorsed in the municipal plenary session, includes the parallel processing of the contracts that must replace the current contract between Madrid Calle 30 and Emesa to guarantee continuity in the service from January 1, 2026, date on that the ring road will now be one hundred percent public, and the prior purchase of Emesa shares.
The workers of Calle 30 will become part of the staff of the companies with which the Madrid City Council carries out contracts and will be subrogated according to the agreement of each category.
The M-30 consists of a 32-kilometer ring, of which 22 run in the open air and ten underground, making it the most extensive network of urban road tunnels in Europe and the second in the world, after Japan.
The ring road is the busiest in Spain, with 374 million trips and 468 million users recorded in 2023.