The president of Repsol, Antonio Brufau, raises the oil company’s warning to transfer key investments for the country’s energy transition due to legal uncertainty. In a speech at the University of Navarra, he extended to France the possibility of taking investments planned by Repsol in Spain. He has focused on 1,500 million planned for hydrogen projects, although this newspaper has already published that the investments under review reach 3,000 million.
According to the transcript provided by the company and this newspaper, Brufau was clear when addressing the audience: “All this investment that we have in Repsol planned in the field of hydrogen is not going to be less than 1,500 million euros, obviously this 1,500M€ “They are subject to one thing, something called, and you will understand it very well, stability. Legal stability, fiscal stability.”
And he stated: “If we have to have a tax that the French or the Portuguese do not have to produce hydrogen, then surely our decision will be to go to Portugal or France.”
Brufau thus goes further than his CEO, Josu Jon Imaz, who gave Portugal as an example last October, when it emerged that the agreement between the PSOE and Sumar perpetuates the so-called special temporary tax on the energy sector, despite the fact that it was planned only for 2022 and 2023.
“So this is what the authorities have to understand to think that this is not a short-term issue, it is a medium and long-term issue and these projects that, as we have discussed before coming here, require a lot of maturity, long period of time, etc. or they are made in a framework of stability, in an attractive fiscal framework, neither better nor worse, attractive, which means competitive with respect to the regions close to us or theoretically they will not fly, and therefore we hope that can fly,” added Brufau.
In his opinion, “it is incomprehensible, for example, that in Spain they want to maintain a temporary tax based on hypothetical extraordinary profits when said tax has already disappeared in all the countries around us. “The costs to which the Government subjects its companies places them at a clear competitive disadvantage,” he protested.
In his opinion, not only Spain, but the European Union as a whole must ensure more than until now the competitiveness of its industry.”Unfortunately I have to say that this, in my opinion, is not happening in its entirety and as a consequence, Europe is losing weight and competitiveness compared to other regions. This is demonstrated by the fact that we continue in the process of decline. And I sincerely believe that without industry a country is not competitive, a country is not modern, a country does not give opportunities to universities or to research or science.
