The Port Authority of Santa Cruz de Tenerife stopped receiving a total of 28.9 million euros in 2022 for subsidizing inter-island traffic by 70% on the passenger rate and 80% on the rate on ships and merchandise, that is, apply these discount percentages in the use of port facilities by said traffic, as explained by the agency.
More specifically, it details that 22.4 million correspond to the bonus for inter-island passenger traffic, another 4.5 million to the merchandise tax and two more as a bonus to the ship tax.
The consolidated text of the Law on State Ports and the Merchant Navy (TRLPEMM) provides that these bonuses, which each island Port Authority must apply, be compensated through a solidarity mechanism between the ports of General Interest of the State, the called the Interport Compensation Fund, in accordance with a series of rules that mean that, for every euro that the Tenerife Port Authority rebates for these concepts, it will barely receive 20 cents from said Fund.
With this formula, the aforementioned Compensation Fund will reimburse the Tenerife Port Authority only 7 million euros, the organization states.
The application of these bonuses is included in TRLPEMM as a measure of general interest associated with the “need to enhance the cohesion of the island territories that make up an archipelago and avoid the effects that lower costs have on the economic development and competitiveness of the islands. additional effects of double insularity.”
However, the Authority remembers that ports are entities that are self-financing, that is, they execute their projects and investments based on their own economic income obtained from the fees paid by port operators.
In this regard, Puertos de Tenerife considers that its proposal that the General State Budgets assume this bonus would allow the island port authorities to reduce port fees for the import of the goods we consume, and make the export of our products cheaper, thus facing with greater solvency of sustainable investment proposals in our port infrastructures without the need to mortgage our future.
Such is the magnitude of this loss of income in the coffers of the Tenerife Port Authority that, if it had counted on them, it would not have had to go into debt to execute the port of Granadilla, a facility in which Puertos de Tenerife has invested since 2010 around 260 million euros, of which 160 million have been financed through bank loans, he concludes.
