Spain TV stations must pay national broadcaster €258.5 million

 

Many of Spain's TV broadcasters will be required to pay RTVE a total of €4.9 million as an extra tax in order to compensate the national public broadcaster for the advertising revenue that it has lost since January 2010.

The Spanish Telecommunications Market Commission (CMT) calculated the revenue to be given to RTVE by telecommunication operators and the private channels, to be a total of €258.5 million.

The financing law states that it is a requirement for TV channels to pay RTVE 3% of their incomes (however, falling to 1.5% if a Pay-TV channel), and a further 0.9% in the for the so-called telco tax for other telcomms operators.

The Tax is to be backdated to the end of 2009 for the TV stations, while for the telcos they must account for it from 2010.

RTVE has also been awarded a total of €20.13 million to correspond with their turnover for the last few months of 2009. However, the CMT detected differences between the incomes before taxes declared by the telcos and what they eventually paid.