The income from the regulated activities of energy companies in Spain and those generated by their businesses abroad will not be taken into account to calculate the so-called tax on profits fallen from heaven, although Spanish legislation will tax the income and not the Benefits.
Some income that, after what was seen yesterday in Congress, will be greatly reduced compared to the initial wording of the rule presented by the Government. The Economic Affairs Committee of the Congress unanimously approved two transactional amendments of the PNV and PDECat so that, within the framework of the energy tax, the corresponding to regulated activities is excluded from the net amount of the turnover and that the tax is applied only to the activity that companies carry out in Spain. "It makes sense that this is the case because they are income capped by the Government and therefore no extraordinary benefit is derived from them," PDECat deputy Ferran Bel explained to this newspaper.
The agreement reached yesterday by the entire parliamentary arch assumes that the extraordinary rate of 1.2% that will be applied to the income of energy companies will not fall on the benefits they obtain from the business that the regulated market supposes. In other words, in the electricity market those coming from the more than 10 million customers who are covered by the PVPC regulated tariff. In the case of gas, those derived from customers covered by the different rates of last resort (TUR) and the bottled liquefied gas (LPG) and piped LPG businesses.
The regulated income from the electricity and natural gas transmission and distribution networks will also be excluded from the impact of the new tax and, in the case of generation with regulated remuneration and additional remuneration in non-peninsular territories, all income from facilities, including those received from the market and economic dispatch, respectively.
With this change in perimeter, the Government's revenue forecasts are also volatilized: 2,000 million euros a year during the two years that it would be in force, which would mean a total of 4,000 million during the period of validity.
In any case, the energy companies had already warned that this was an excessively optimistic calculation. Both Endesa and Iberdrola were considering an impact close to only 400 million euros, which upsets the forecast of the State Budgets.
Although the impact could have a longer journey. The Government has committed in writing to Bildu that an impact assessment of the tax will be carried out in 2024 and, depending on its result, it could be decided that the tax becomes permanent.
The regulations will be approved next Thursday in the plenary session of Congress with time to be applied as of January 2023. At the Iberdrola headquarters yesterday they did numbers to see to what extent this reduction in the scope of application of the tax could mean a change in the company's decision to go to the courts of justice if Spanish law decides to apply to income and not to profits, as the EU marks.
Based on the 2021 audit report, the savings could be around 74%, since the net amount of income for that year from the regulated market was 17,258 million, compared to the 19,613 obtained in the non-regulated market.
