The closure of a chapter in the port of Las Palmas was formalized this Monday with the dissolution of Naviera Llera, the company that connected giants such as Banco Santander (inherited from Banco Popular) and Inditex, as confirmed to Canarymaritime by financial sources. The company has permanently closed through a voluntary dissolution, ending a trajectory marked more by the courts than by navigation. It was a company for cargo operations of the textile group. The dissolution of the company is not a random move, but the judicial epilogue of a nearly two-decade battle against the Tax Agency. The liquidation coincides with the entity’s victory in the National Court, where the Administrative Litigation Chamber upheld the shipping company’s appeal against the corporate tax assessments for the years 2007 to 2012. The key to the conflict lay in the controversial Spanish tax lease system, the state aid scheme that the European Commission declared illegal in 2013, ordering Spain to recover the subsidies. However, after years of appeals in Europe, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) turned the case around in February 2023, ruling that the Commission was wrong to identify the AIE investors as the sole beneficiaries that should return the money. Faced with this European setback, the State Attorney’s Office had no choice but to acquiesce in the national process. The ruling from the National Court, dated June 2024 but now having definitive effects as the registral deactivation is formalized, annulled the resolutions of the Central Economic Administrative Tribunal (TEAC) that sought to collect millions of euros from Santander’s and Amancio Ortega’s shipping company. The liquidation process has been entrusted to Gestión de Inversiones Jilt SA and Inditex itself, represented by Juan Carlos Castro Rico and Andrés Sánchez Iglesias, respectively. With the extinction of Naviera Llera, the main partners close a structure that, while successful in terms of litigation, had become an administrative and reputational burden due to the legal uncertainty that surrounded the Spanish naval sector for years.
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