A ruling from the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) forces the Generalitat to pay for the services that it stopped paying to Renfe overnight in 2017. Since then, the Territory Department has not paid the corresponding annual amounts to the expansion of Rodalies services incorporated after the transfer of ownership of the service. They are improvements such as the putting into service of a train early in the morning for airport workers or the extension of circulation from Mataró to Arenys de Mar for which the Generalitat paid without problems from 2010 until it stopped doing so.
The ruling, to which La Vanguardia has had access, estimates the unpaid invoice by the Generalitat between 2016 and 2019 at 80.9 million euros, which is the period appealed by Renfe. The state operator had claimed it actively and passively both at a technical and political level until he chose to present a contentious administrative appeal due to the lack of response from the Generalitat, which has now been sentenced to pay that amount.
The refusal to pay for services that Renfe continued – and continues – to provide occurred when Rajoy was still in the Moncloa and Carles Puigdemont was still in the Palau de la Generalitat. Successive governments since then have not changed the attitude. The current Territori department team already reported this summer that they did not plan to pay the 2022 bill, just as they had not done in previous years.
One of the reasons given by those responsible for the Catalan executive for not paying is the increase in fees from the railway infrastructure manager (Adif) produced in those years, both for complementary services and those agreed upon in the 2010 transfer.
The ruling resolves that it is the Generalitat that must also assume this increase in cost and, in any case, subsequently negotiate the issue with the Ministry of Transport (at that time of Development), but without this affecting the payments previously agreed with Renfe. It does so based on an agreement of the Joint Commission of Economic and Fiscal Affairs (CMAEF) of the State and the Generalitat in 2009, in which both parties agreed that a hypothetical increase in fees for the use of infrastructure would be something to discuss between the two administrations involved without causing harm to the company Renfe Viajeros.
The ruling also makes it clear that the action plan that includes the complementary services agreed between Generalitat and Renfe are the responsibility of the Catalan government, which is the owner of the service. Therefore, they must be the ones to assume payment for the services to the operator that provides them.
The existence of a program contract that clearly regulated the conditions of the service and its financing would have avoided reaching the point of judicialization of this payment. The pending figure today, adding the transfers that have not been satisfied between 2020 and 2022, far exceeds 100 million euros in total. As the ruling allows for an appeal and the Catalan government could show its disagreement, the dispute could still drag on for a few more years.
