EDITORIAL

By Jason Moore SO the tourist tax is still going to be levied this summer eventhough the new Balearic government claims that it has destroyed the tourist industry. New Balearic President Jaume Matas has said that the tax wouldn't be abolished until at least September or October because parliament has to meet and pass the necessary bill revoking the tourist tax law, passed by the previous administration. So thousands if not millions of tourists are going to find that they have less money to spend because Balearic MPs can't be summoned back from holiday this summer to approve new legislation. I am sure that if Matas wanted to scrap the tax right away he could so. After all, he has always maintained that the previous administration was a disaster and their tourism policies were deeply flawed. Recall parliament Sr. Matas and live up to your manifesto pledge. “The first thing I am going to do is scrap the tax,” Matas told the Bulletin the day after his landslide victory. That was Monday May 26. It appears that it is going to take at least four to five months for Matas to do so. I suspect that Matas needs the tourist tax cash to pay for many of the projects which had been introduced by the previous government. In the warm-up to the last elections the last local government went on a major spending spree using tourist tax cash, much of which, still had to be collected. Matas has said that all these contracts will be honoured. At a time when tourist resorts across the world are offering important incentives the new Balearic government feels that the tax cannot be scrapped before the end of the season. A very strange state of affairs.