2023-08-31 05:30:09
COLCANOPA
From February 24, the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, announced the color: to finance a costly plan to renovate the rail network, her government wanted to involve motorway companies and air travel. An intention confirmed on August 21 by the Minister for Transport, Clément Beaune, who wanted to reassure motorists: “If there is a tax, it will have no impact on tolls. »
In The Obshe again specified that ecology should not be, for the French, “neither a hassle nor a punishment”. But a few days before the budget is closed, the contours of the tax are still not known. Bercy, which hopes to earn between 300 million and 500 million euros per year, perhaps more, is faced with a headache: the motorway concession companies (Vinci, Eiffage or Abertis) are certain to be “immune against any new tax that would specifically target their activity.
For the subsidiaries of Vinci, Eiffage or the Spanish Abertis, the situation is very clear. Since the privatization of motorway companies – orchestrated when Dominique de Villepin was Prime Minister and Bruno Le Maire, his closest adviser – the law promises to maintain “economic and financial balance” contracts. An assurance that was reinforced and clarified in 2015, during the negotiation of the motorway recovery plan by Emmanuel Macron, at the time Minister of the Economy, and by Elisabeth Borne, who was then director of cabinet of Ségolène Royal.
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Assurance of “stability of compulsory deductions”
“It’s Section 32”, we explain at Vinci Autoroutes. It has a history: after the environmental tax fiasco, following the revolt of the Breton “red caps”, it was necessary to compensate the Italian company that installed the gates. The State then asked motorway companies for an “exceptional voluntary contribution” (CVE) of 60 million euros per year for twenty years, or more than 1 billion euros, the amount of the invoice. In return, the motorway management companies obtained an insurance of “stability of compulsory levies”with a guarantee that if “the economic and financial balance of the concession” were to be degraded, “compensation measures, in particular tariffs”, would be taken. In other words: the companies would pass on the new toll taxes.
Emmanuel Macron himself explained it before the Senate on April 9, 2015, declaring: “A voluntary contribution from motorway concession companies to the financing of public infrastructure will be introduced (…). At the same time, the government (…) will not create any specific fees or charges during this period. These corporations will only experience the tax cuts or increases of all corporations. » On the strength of this declaration, the leaders of Vinci Autoroutes or Eiffage refuse any new tax and prepare to assert their contracts in court.
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