Gains from the resale of gas promise to intensify disputes between Galp and State – Public.en

With over a State Budget around the corner, it will prolong the litigation between the Company and the State around the extraordinary contribution on energy sector (CESE), who arrived as an exceptional measure, but is of stone and lime since 2014.

Yet last week, in the presentation of the results of the first nine months of the year, the Galp, the president of the oil company, Carlos Gomes da Silva, assured that the company will not pay the EESC in 2017 (for which the Government signed up in the budget proposal for 2017 an expected revenue of 90 million). The story back to again and again.

Yet to know what this new front of battle you want the Government open with the evaluation requested to the ERSE on the earnings of the company with the resale of gas, the international that led to the creation of the EESC 2 (only for Flags), already in 2015. But it is not expected that the company’s strategy change.

as in the EESC applied to the assets of the distribution and refinery (with an impact of approximately 25 million), also in gas (where have the outstanding € 50 million in three years, until 2017) the Company has challenged in court what it considers to be an unlawful tax. The energy company has chosen to deliver the bank guarantees, thus avoiding fall in a situation of non-compliance tax, but leaving soon for the legal dispute. It is a different strategy from that followed by the REN, who has paid the remarkable rate of about 25 million per year, although contesting it in court.

So, since 2014 that the Company recognizes provisions to cope with the tax. In their accountability documents the oil makes the safeguarding of that "accounting made in relation to the EESC stems from the strict application of regulatory accounting". This is because the oil understands that "the legislative provisions relating to the EESC are violative of the law, not being the amounts in question due and payable".

In 2014, the Company provisioned approximately € 25 million, a figure that has almost doubled in 2015 and 2016 by the fact that the contribution has been extended to its contracts to import natural gas.

THE EDP pays a bigger slice of the EESC. According to the reports of the company, in the last three years have been paid 60 million per year. Although comply with the law, EDP has already signaled that the patience of the shareholder is exhausted. This was one of the themes that the leaders of China Three Gorges, who had been in Portugal in the Summer, they brought on the agenda to discuss with the Portuguese Government.

Although it has been initially announced as a measure that generates 150 million euros in annual revenue, according to the data that are known from the budgetary execution of 2014, the EESC (normal, that is, of the assets of the transportation, distribution and energy production and refinery) resulted in a fitting for the State of 61.5 million euros. Already in 2015, the revenue for the public purse were 115 million.