MADRIDThe Extraordinary Council of Ministers gave the green light this Friday to compensate Abertis with 1,070 million euros for the completion of the AP-7 concession. Specifically, the Spanish government will pay 1,069.9 million euros to the concessionaire Acesa, which belongs to Abertis, as compensation for the settlement of the investments made to deal with the increase in traffic on the AP-7, in the sections Barcelona – La Jonquera, Barcelona-Tarragona, and Montmeló and El Papiol and Zaragoza-Mediterranean, on the AP-2. These actions were foreseen in the agreement between the company and the State to mitigate the congestion of vehicles that occurred at certain times in certain sections of the route.
The concession ended on August 31 last year and the agreement between the company and the state states that the payment must be made within six months of its expiration, ie that the deadline was this February. This pass, however, is no surprise. The Stability Plan that Pedro Sánchez’s executive sent to Brussels provided for compensation of up to 1,291 million euros, far from the 3,000 that Abertis was claiming. Finally, of the 1,069 million euros paid, 505.5 million euros correspond to the executed investment, 143 million euros to the tax effect and the rest corresponds to the capitalization of the compensation balance, according to the ministry. of Transport.
The conflict originated in 2006, when the then Minister of Public Works, Magdalena Álvarez, under the mandate of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, signed an agreement with the concessionaire to carry out works to widen these roads. the estimated increase in traffic and without passing on the cost to the price of tolls. In return, the company might be compensated if the expected vehicle traffic was not reached, which in fact fell due to the financial crisis of 2008 and the current crisis of the pandemic. Therefore, the concessionaire considered that the compensation should be higher.
