The municipal group of United We Can (Izquierda Unida-Podemos-Equo) has collected from the City Council of Santa Cruz de Tenerife the data on the money saved by the Catholic Church “because of the favored treatment” it receives by not having to pay the Income Tax. Real Estate (IBI), the party points out in a statement. In the case of the capital of Tenerife, this amount amounts to more than 93,000 euros per year, an amount that the municipal public coffers do not receive due to the exemption from the payment of this tax in 107 properties owned by the Bishopric, only in the capital of Tenerife.
United We Can requested these figures in writing and has received a response to the global ones, but not the list of specific buildings, information that the Chicharrero City Council refuses to give, clinging to a notification from the Canary Islands Transparency Commissioner so as not to identify the properties and their cadastral value.
The councilor of UP Yaiza Gorrín regrets that “this specific data cannot be obtained, according to the Commissioner” because the Church “is not a State, nor an Autonomous Community, nor a local entity, nor is it foreign governments” and this information would be under the protection of the Organic Law on Data Protection.
The mayor states that, obviously, the IBI exemption is not a municipal decision, but a state one, in application of the Concordat between Spain and the Holy See, for which she maintains that the time has come to renegotiate this agreement between states “to leave of unjustifiably and arbitrarily favoring the Church in a non-denominational state”.
“It could be understood that certain properties of extraordinary artistic and historical value had public subsidies as part of the collective heritage,” says Gorrín, “or that those intended for social purposes to help vulnerable groups could benefit from aid, including fiscal aid, but it should not be be a public benefit that only a single religious organization systematically enjoys, and furthermore, it would be necessary to determine in what uses and purposes of a real property it is fair to give this tax treatment and what conditions must be met by these organizations to obtain it in terms of respect to human rights and constitutional principles such as equality and non-discrimination”.
“It must also be taken into account that the money that the City Council stops receiving for this reason must be covered by the rest of the citizenry with the payment of taxes,” concludes the councilor of the left-wing confluence.
