The High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has dealt a decisive blow to Onalia Bueno's revenue collection strategy in southern Gran Canaria. The Administrative Chamber of the Canary Islands' highest court has annulled the Tax Ordinance Regulating the Fee for Services and Activities Derived from Tourism and the Sustainability Obligation. The court ruling upholds the legal arguments of the business association, granting the appeal filed by the Federation of Hospitality and Tourism Businesses of the province of Las Palmas (FEHT) in a case where the consulting firm KPMG prevailed over the financial engineering of the southern municipality.
The court ruling dismantles the legal framework of a levy that sought to charge €0,15 per day to each visitor staying in tourist accommodations in the municipality. The mayor of Mogán justified the implementation of the tax in February 2025 on the premise that a mass tourism destination required extra funds to maintain essential public services. The first year the measure was in effect resulted in revenue of €1,4 million, a cash flow that is now frozen following the court's ruling, which deems the municipal initiative a blatant attempt to disguise a tax as a local levy.
The judges of the regional court agreed with the business sector's argument, stating that the city council had flagrantly violated the principle of legality. The court emphasized that municipalities lack the authority to create their own taxes, a power reserved for regional and national governments. The ruling determined that the ordinance distorted the legal concept of a fee to create a disguised environmental tax, using a facade of environmental sustainability to fill municipal coffers at the expense of the accommodation sector.
The core of the court ruling criticizes the deliberate imprecision in the wording of the text approved by the governing coalition, Juntos por Mogán. The judgment highlights that the taxable event was defined using vague, abstract, and generic expressions that made it impossible to determine what specific services the taxpayer received in exchange for their money. Terms used in the ordinance, such as "environmental projects," "actions derived from tourism," "circular economy," and "protection of historical heritage," have been deemed ambiguous by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), which requires a clear and precise relationship between the payment and the public service provided.
The FEHT's legal offensive also focused on the technical deficiencies of the economic and financial report that supported the tourist tax. The KPMG study omitted the public subsidies received by the city council and improperly included general operating costs of the municipal bureaucracy itself. Furthermore, the ordinance violated the principle of visitor ability to pay by establishing an identical flat rate for all users, without differentiating between the various categories of luxury hotels and apartment complexes.
The tourism sector's discontent was exacerbated by the city council's decision to shift the administrative burden and responsibility for collecting the tax onto the business owners and property proprietors themselves. Tour operators and hoteliers were effectively transformed by decree into enforced collectors of a tax of dubious legality, a factor that generated unanimous rejection from the opposition parties in the plenary session, where Nueva Canarias and the PSOE had already pointed out the document's shortcomings. The TSJC ruling confirms the worst predictions for the city council, which sees the court definitively halt the collection of the tax one day after the online newspaper elDiario.es He will reveal the details of the ruling that leaves the viability of Mogán's budgets up in the air.
