The Local Government Board has approved this Friday to claim from the State the patrimonial damage suffered by the Valencia City Council due to the Constitutional Court ruling that declared null and void some articles of the municipal capital gains law. The City Council has so far received 16,696 citizen claims and provisionally estimates the economic damage at around 15 million euros.
The Councilor for the Treasury, Borja Sanjuán, who appeared yesterday at the end of the Meeting accompanied by the Deputy Mayor, Sergi Campillo, stated that “when a local Administration suffers damage due to a regulatory problem that is not caused by the municipalities, it is expected that the General Administration of the State compensate this loss of income because it is part of the ordinary financing that we have to be able to provide our public services and it is up to the municipalities to recover this money”.
Sanjuán also explained that “the City Council opens this way to ensure that it maintains all the lines to recover this money and we hope that the solution does not have to be in court but through transfers.”
The councilor has advanced that “we can already certify more than 15 million euros of damage to the Valencia City Council. We have received 16,696 claims of this nature and not all the files have been resolved”. For Sanjuán, “it has been a waste of resources but also a very significant management burden to process these 16,000 additional files. This City Council has had to reinforce the personnel assigned to the resolution of this type of task and has had to make an assistance contract, which we will also include in the claim.
In October 2021, the Constitutional Court annulled various aspects of the municipal capital gains tax, which generated great alarm in the Spanish consistories due to the reduction that it would entail in the municipal coffers.
At that time, the mayor of Valencia, Joan Ribó, already assured that if the tax were confirmed, the State would be “obliged to compensate the city councils for the loss of income”, losses that would have a special impact on large municipalities and in the tourist locations.
