The construction company Cobra, belonging to a business group chaired by Florentino Pérez, also president of Real Madrid, was condemned for applying “unfair terms to subcontractors” and for payment delays to those same companies, within periods longer than those stipulated by Spanish law. payment to suppliers, according to “El Economista”.
The Madrid Provincial Court denied the option of appeal that Cobra filed against an entity, Anefhop, which denounced it on behalf of some of its associates and for which the ACS subsidiary was condemned for the application of up to four clauses that were considered unfair and that the judge ensured that they set a series of deadlines in order to delay the promised payments beyond the 60 days provided by law for the payment of suppliers in the case of the private sector (30 days for public companies).
Specifically, the judge revokes the precepts of the contract that establish payment terms that vary between 90 days, 120 days and up to 180 days and that establish that the “dies a quo” of the payment term is valid from the date of the invoice - which it establishes that the due dates and, therefore, of payment, are limited to the 10th and 25th of each month, and those that foresee that the payment terms whose due date ends in August are automatically transferred to September 10th. As such, the clauses created by the company are declared null and even prohibited from being used again in the future, under penalty of fines or the inhibition of managers to practice their positions.
As the president of PMcM, Antoni Cañete, explains about the sentence, the key to the company Cobra being the one condemned in these terms represents one of the achievements of the approval of law 15/2010 on payment to suppliers where one of the issues eliminated is the agreement of the parties . That it is nothing more than a system that allowed the concessionaire to agree with the SMEs payment terms superior to those established by law, and that from that moment on are illegal.
The Court considers that Cobra included these four clauses as for all subcontracted companies, which allowed it to vary the payment period between 90 and 180 days, but never below. It was a recurring practice due to the requests under analysis by the judge, who, quoted by “El Economista”, stated “we cannot ignore that, with the lawsuit, 51 concrete requests were submitted with general stereotyped conditions, in which the conditions payment terms are included in the same way. As a result of the requested test, another 279 requests were submitted with the same formula ”.
