Repsol has won. Iberdrola has won. The threats made in the Spanish Congress of Deputies have managed to cancel the new temporary tax imposed on large energy companies, which would be an extension of what a few companies have paid in the last two years. The Junts and the PNV have joined the People’s Party and Vox’s far-right votes to exempt large energy companies from taxes.

Even the concessions granted by the government have not worked. The Catalan nationalists demanded that the green investments made by these companies be deducted from the amount to be paid from the new tax figure. The demands of the Junts appeared after the CEO of Repsol, Josu Imaz, and the former leader of the PNV, published in the newspaper La Vanguardia a column entitled “Industry or populism”. In the article Imaz threatened to transfer the investments that were to be made in Tarragona to Portugal.

The text presented by the Ministry of Finance a few weeks ago and cancelled on Wednesday included a tax relief system for green investments that the Ministry of Ecological Transition considered strategic. But it seems that even this concession has not satisfied the Catalans who have voted against it.

According to the demands of the Basque nationalists, they wanted the collection to remain in the foral haciendas, as is done with other taxes. But this cession is impossible with the temporary nature of the tax. In view of the difficulties in the development and design of a permanent tax and the shortage of time for the tax collection to be transferred to the Basque institutions, the new proposal foresaw that in the last quarter of the year the effects of the tax and the possibility of it being permanent would be studied. This led to the understanding that in 2027 the tax would become permanent and distributed as required by the PNV.

But even the PNV has not approved the new text or the possibility of extending the tax for another year. Nor have they wanted to open the door to the study and design of a new tax for these large energy companies. The reaper didn't end here. The fact that the tax does not go forward has a greater impact: Podemos warns that it will not support the General State Budgets if the tax does not go forward. The failure of the budget to move forward for the second year in a row has made Wednesday’s vote a double failure, one of the most painful for the coalition government. The repealed tax charged the turnover of companies with sales exceeding EUR 1 billion. Only Repsol, Iberdrola, Endesa, Naturgy and EDP paid. As a result, the company raised about $3 billion.