"He who steals little goes to the galley,
who steals a lot has a career"
It always passes quickly and from one day to the next, like a flower that never summer and a tree that doesn't let you see the forest, but the state Treasury has once again made public this week the official list of major tax defaulters in the Kingdom of Spain. Eleven hundred and eleven individuals and four thousand seven hundred companies have in common that they owe more than 600,000 euros to the public coffers – and no, they are not precarious migrants in search of life, work, and future. They are few who owe a lot, for a total outstanding amount that rises to 15,364,000,000 euros. I haven't heard any statement from Foment del Treball regarding persistent fiscal absenteeism, but I stare magnetically at the figure, almost dazzled, absorbed in the eleven digits. Trying to think how this fortune, euro by euro, would translate into strengthening so many strained public services – schools, hospitals, or support for SMEs. However, it is all a mirage and a simulation. Because another figure, the real one, reminds us that the publication of the list is in vain. The other number leaves me roasted on the way to fried: Treasury inspectors report that, from the fiscal year 2025, only 220 million have been recovered. 1.4% of the total. A fiscal hell – for all of us – that doesn't even cover a drop in the ocean. Saying this this week, when the vast majority have noticed in their current accounts how public taxation went through the cash register – whether to return or to pay – serves to remind us that for a long time, we haven't all truly been with the Treasury. In smaller magnitudes, the nascent Tax Agency of Catalonia has made the same list public these days: 60 debtors with an outstanding amount of 184 million, headed by an unknown who owes 65 million. And one is left pondering the doubt of how on earth a debt of 65 million accumulates without anything happening before.I take for granted that the list's case studies are multiple –many stem from bankruptcies and creditor proceedings–, but beyond the nosiness for names and the haggling over some economies, in the altarpiece there are too many usual suspects, flagship companies of the real estate bubble and a few studio characters. The crucial issue is that non-payment is only one of the faces of a structural tax fraud –elusion, evasion, shell companies, false double residency, bonuses for large companies or investment funds– which amounts to 60,000 million euros annually. Wide-eyed people are turning again, trying to ground the hefty sum in an increasingly unequal and striking social reality. The unshakeable feeling that it's all one after another makes a hole. A black hole through which so many things escape.
Ultimately, with impassive inertia, every two months, on the gas bill, we pay Florentino the public bailout of 1,350 million euros for the Castor case mess – approved by the Zapatero government in 2008–. And so it will be until 2044, for a real price of 4,700 million if we add interest and maintenance costs. All in all, it is this same elitist group that has received the most amnesties. Four and a half tax amnesties, which leads one to assume that the ultra-rich, in this regard, do not cry at all: they only laugh into their pockets. One thing and the other – the Castor case and the amnesties– brutally link together in a strange legal threshold: that at some point, transitively, justice clearly pronounced itself. In December 2017, the Constitutional Court declared the compensation for the Castor case null and void, also annulling the express, record-time, and by decree-law, manner in which it was paid by Mariano Rajoy's government: in just 30 days. Six months earlier, the same court, unanimously, had declared Montoro's tax amnesty unconstitutional, arguing that instead of eradicating fraud, it protected it. But one must always look at the fine print, when the law is made, the trap is set. In 2020, the Supreme Court finally forced the State to pay the 1,350 million to the three banks (Santander, Bankia and la Caixa) that had advanced the PP's compensation to Florentino. In a similar way, the Constitutional Court's ruling is surreal and sub-real: it decreed the unconstitutionality of the amnesty, but did not deny any of its effects to the 31,000 tax evaders who were amnestied – from Bárcenas to two sons of Jordi Pujol, from a host of PP officials in Madrid to Urdangarin's scamming partner–. They did not return a single cent. We could say, paraphrasing them, that the ruling did the same as it criticized: it did not eradicate fraud, because in the end it protected it. More than sufficient accumulated reason to think, too reasonably, that the law of the funnel is sacred, that at high levels there is always a big party on the shoulders of the public treasury, that they piss on us and say it's raining, and that the numbers only work out for them. The public bank bailout of 2012 that will never be repaid is estimated at around 50,000 million. Since 2013, Spanish banks have earned, however, 215,000 million euros in net profit. Don't tell me how, but they could have scratched their pockets and returned what they owe us.Without fiscal democracy there will never be democracy, and I know we are in an era of confusion, where one thing happens and the opposite at the same time, where we must again simultaneously denounce corruption and dirty war, and where, above all, we must forget to believe in anything or anyone. That is why I qualify and clarify that I really like paying taxes, just as much as I dislike, too often, how they are spent or wasted. In fact, I am passionate about paying them. More every day. And every time I go to the CAP to see the doctor, I reaffirm it. It also happens that, lacking references in a world adrift, I must say that the figure of the tax inspector increasingly appeals to me. With a final flourish. While rereading the astronomical figure of 15,364 million, I suddenly remembered some Hispanic "criptobros" installed in Dubai shouting "let Rita pay" and "the State robs us". Those who bragged for years that they "are not fools" and that they evade paying taxes because they are very smart. They are the same ones who rushed to demand that the State where they do not pay taxes rescue them with public funds when Trump started the insane war with Iran. One, like so many, expected, even though I know very well and in advance that this has not been the case, that the State would at least have charged them the full bill for an urgent repatriation under the bombs. But no. It has turned out, once again and so many times, that we have paid these evaders for their return for free, that it turns out that Rita is us, and that "the fools" of the chronicle are here and we are still here. And so on – only until one day we know how to say enough.
