The Minister of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, confirmed today that the Executive will continue with its proposal for a bank tax despite the harsh opinion issued yesterday by the European Central Bank (ECB), which warns of possible adverse effects on banking and consumers. However, the first vice president of the Executive is open to introducing "improvements".
"We had already analyzed the issues raised by the ECB when designing the tax and now it is going through the parliamentary process, in which all the improvements that the Legislative Power of our country considers appropriate can be introduced," said the vice president first in statements this Friday at the Spanish Embassy in London.
In its report, which is not binding, the European body considers that the new temporary tax, with which the Government wants to raise 3,000 million euros between 2022 and 2023, could damage the profitability of financial institutions. He also fears that the tax will distort competition, affect credit granting and part of its cost will end up being passed on to customers. In fact, the banking supervisor considers "legitimate" price increases applicable to customers due to increased costs.
However, Calviño maintains that the central bank's ruling does not seem "particularly surprising". He assures that the report points out the issues to be taken into account when making decisions when imposing this type of tax, "both in Spain and in any other country that may be considering it," he added.
In addition, the minister has argued that the tax is introduced at a time when the large Spanish banks are announcing "enormous extraordinary benefits that explain the justice and appropriateness of having this temporary tax that guarantees the distribution" of the economic effects of the war , so the impact will be "low". "It is clear that the banks have margin and they do not need to transfer this tax to the clients", she added.
Likewise, he hopes that the tax will enter into force as soon as possible, although he admits the possibility that changes will be introduced in the parliamentary procedure. "As in all projects, the text will be improved or those amendments or proposals that we consider to be more valuable and can improve the functioning of the tax will be incorporated," he underlined.
He also recalled that the law incorporates a mechanism by which the National Market and Competition Commission (CNMC) and the Bank of Spain will monitor that there is no transfer of the cost of the tax to customers. For this reason, it maintains that the measure does not have to put at risk either the transmission of monetary policy, or the granting of credit, or the proper functioning of the financial system, issues that the European banking supervisor asks to analyze in its opinion, which sees "difficult" to differentiate whether the tax will be transferred effectively to customers or not, even if the CNMC supervises it.
