The president of the Board of Andalusia, Juanma Moreno, raised on Friday with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, his “concern about the difference in income” between the Andalusian municipalities bordering Gibraltar and the British colony and the peso that British taxation has in that gap. Moreno also highlighted the problem that it entails for the municipalities that make up the region of Campo de Gibraltar “to live with a tax haven without borders in the current conditions”.
Moreno spoke yesterday with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, after the negotiations between Spain and the United Kingdom on Gibraltar, which concluded without an agreement on Thursday in a meeting held in Brussels.
In a conversation that lasted for twenty minutes, as sources from the Andalusian Government explained to Europa Press, the minister expressed “his willingness to continue in permanent dialogue” with the aim of “guaranteeing transparency in the negotiation” both with the president of the Board and with the mayors of the area with whom he held a video conference.
These contacts, which follow the meetings held on Monday at the headquarters of the ministry, allowed the minister to inform them about the “progress” in the negotiation after the meeting held the day before in Brussels with the vice-president of the European Commission in charge of the issue, Maros Sefcovic, and his British counterpart, David Cameron, in which the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, was also present.
The good institutional tone of the Foreign Minister’s talks with the president of the Andalusian community and the mayors of the area did not prevent the deputy secretary of the PP, Elías Bendodo, from assuring Jaén yesterday that “the Government is making water in negotiations of foreign policy”, with reference to these conversations. “The diplomacy led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is permanently transformed into concessions, not negotiations”.
According to Bendodo, the negotiation on Gibraltar “would be stronger and more forceful if the Government had counted on the town councils, the Mancomunitat del Campo de Gibraltar and the Junta d’Andalusia”.
The minister, in an interview granted to TVE, did not want to go into details about the state of the talks, but after Thursday’s meeting, he assured that there is no “insurmountable obstacle” in which the parties are “colliding frontally”, although he admitted that “there is still work to be done in everything that has to do with the guarantees that we want for the application of Schengen controls, of the customs area, and also on the harmonization of indirect taxes”.
