The Supreme Court has annulled Ferrovial's corporate tax assessment for the 2006 financial year, considering that the company suffered "material helplessness" in the inspections carried out and did not have a "real guarantee" against the administration.
This decision comes at a sensitive moment in relations between the Government and Ferrovial, which decided this year to move its headquarters to the Netherlands. The company itself has warned investors that the Treasury does not rule out punishing it fiscally by canceling the neutrality regime requested for the change of registered office.
The new resolution of the contentious-administrative chamber of the Supreme Court responds to a previous litigation and is the result of an appeal filed by the National Court in February 2019, according to the court ruling, reported by La Informacion and to which La Vanguardia had access.
The controversy concerns the acquisition in 2006 of a stake in BAA, the operator of London's Heahtrow airport, in which Ferrovial deducted part of the corporate tax associated with investment in foreign companies. The Tax Agency considers that the purchase cannot be conceived as an export and that is why it issued a tax settlement different from that calculated by the company.
This dispute is one of Ferrovial's two main disputes with the Treasury. The other is related to the acquisitions also made at that time of the British companies Amey and Swissport, made thanks to the goodwill deductions with which several large Spanish companies made acquisitions abroad in those years. The European Justice has just validated this practice.
In the case of the purchase of the stake in Heathrow, the Supreme Court ruling does not report the amount, but Ferrovial has estimated it in its annual accounts at 119 million euros, including interest. This amount had already been provided by the company itself.
In the ruling, the Supreme Court focuses on the formal rulings of the Treasury's actions. It considers the settlement carried out to be "null and void" since it was made "without assessing the taxpayer's prior allegations, presented in a timely manner, preceded by the extension of a record of disagreement in which neither his allegations nor the documents were assessed." contributed".
These procedures, the ruling states, were "absolutely ineffective", when in reality they are conceived as a "real guarantee for the taxpayer." The Administration, however, was not able to preserve its "effectiveness", so "the existence of material helplessness must be presumed."
The company denounced that the Administration acted "in a hasty and premature manner, without giving it time to have the allegations in its possession." The reason could be that "there were doubts about the normal duration of the procedure and there could be a risk of prescribing the Administration's right to liquidate."
Ferrovial also denounced the Tax Agency for making several decisions on the same day without following the established administrative procedures. On the same day, the Treasury proceeded to "complement actions, disaggregate the concept that is the subject of the new proceedings and approve the liquidation with respect to the rest of the regularized matters," he says.
"We are witnessing a true contempt for the procedural process," the Supreme Court concludes in the ruling.
