After the hopeful press release published last week on the Constitutional Court ruling, yesterday we were faced with the harsh reality of its content, and almost all of our hopes for a claim have been clearly diminished in the wording of the aforementioned ruling.
The Municipal Capital Gain Tax (Increase in Value of Urban Land) is annulled in its current wording and, above all, the calculation method. Therefore, the municipalities are temporarily left without one of their main sources of income. But the sentence considerably reduces the cases that can be claimed, since it establishes that the situations prior to this sentence of October 26 will not be reviewable. In other words, provisional or definitive tax assessments that have not been challenged before the aforementioned date will be considered “consolidated situations”.
Therefore, it does open the way for its cancellation to all settlements drawn and self-assessments that are not firm. That is, to those that have been challenged and have not been resolved and, of course, to all those liquidations for capital gains that are generated as of October 26.
It draws attention, above all, the impossibility that the sentence manifests with respect to those municipalities where this tax is settled through a self-assessment, which is carried out by the taxpayer or taxpayer, since the legislation clearly allows them to be rectified during the following four years at the end of the voluntary term for admission. A situation not allowed by the Judgment, which would therefore create controversy and new litigation, since there is a clear situation of inequality between those who claimed in their day and those who accepted the settlement in accordance with previous pronouncements of the Court itself and who they are still within the rectification period according to the General Tax Law.
Jose Angel Viñes
Partner-Lawyer of Carrau Corporación