Retired Spaniards protest over retroactive 'asset grab' on pensions earned working abroad
Tuesday, August 5, 2014 @ 1:13 PM
AROUND 100 Spanish retirees protested in front of the tax office in Ferrol, Galicia yesterday (Monday) over plans to tax their pensions earned abroad retroactively.
Migrants who were forced to work in France, Germany and Latin America during Franco's dictatorship and who earned pensions were told last year that their earnings from these must now be declared to the Spanish tax authorities, who will apply retentions on them even where they would not be subject to tax in their country of issue whether the recipient was resident there or not.
And the latest blow they have received means the tax will apply on pension income from the year 2008 and the full amount for those years payable now.
They will also be fined where this pension income has not previously been declared.
Many are now in their 70s, 80s or even 90s and just about scrape a living from their foreign and Spanish pensions combined.
But money-laundering rules mean any resident in Spain who holds assets abroad is required to declare these via Form 720 as from last April, which means many expatriates as well as Spaniards who had to go to other countries to work in factories and on farms between the 1930s and 1970s.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com