Retraction: There Is No Circular 7/2026 and No €600,000 SPV Penalty Regime
This article has been withdrawn. It was published on 13 June 2026 and it was not accurate. We are leaving this URL in place, with the correction, rather than deleting it or replacing it with unrelated content — anyone who read the original, or who acted on it, is entitled to find the retraction where the article used to be.
What we published, and what was wrong with it
On 13 June 2026 we published an article under the headline "Andalucía ITP Exemption Loophole Closes: New €600K Penalty Regime Reshapes Marbella Acquisition Math". It reported that "Circular 7/2026", issued by the Consejería de Hacienda on 11 June and effective immediately, closed an ITP exemption used by offshore SPVs to reduce transfer tax from 7% to 1.5% or zero under "Ley 14/2013 Article 45"; that "Real Decreto 12/2026" of 9 June triggered automatic audits of SPVs registered within 180 days of a purchase; and that penalties reached €600,000 against a 30 June compliance deadline.
None of that is accurate. Circular 7/2026 and Real Decreto 12/2026 do not exist. No 17-day compliance window and no 30 June deadline were set, and no €600,000 penalty regime was created.
The legal citation at the heart of the article is a conflation of two unrelated statutes. Ley 14/2013 is the Entrepreneurs Act — the law that created the now-abolished investor visa. It has no Article 45 governing transfer-tax exemptions. The exemptions article the piece was reaching for is Article 45 of the consolidated ITP text approved by Real Decreto Legislativo 1/1993, which does not operate as the article described. The 1,847 identified transactions, the €2.1 billion in declared value and the €287,000 average underpayment were fabricated.
What is true, and was true before this article and remains true after it, is that acquiring Spanish property through an offshore structure attracts scrutiny under Spain's general anti-avoidance rule and beneficial-ownership disclosure obligations, and that such structures rarely deliver the transfer-tax saving they are marketed on. That is a reason to take advice — not evidence of a June 2026 crackdown.
The correct position: ITP in Andalucía is 7%
Andalucía applies a single flat rate of 7% to the transfer of resale residential property between private parties (Impuesto sobre Transmisiones Patrimoniales). The rate was cut to 7% by Decreto-ley 7/2021 of 27 April 2021 and made permanent by Ley 5/2021 of 20 October 2021, which replaced the earlier sliding scale with one rate. It has not changed since.
There is no 11% band. There is no €600,000, €1 million or €2 million threshold at which a higher rate begins, and there is no separate rate for non-resident, non-EU or foreign buyers. Nationality and tax residence do not change the ITP rate you pay. Reduced rates do exist, but they turn on the buyer's personal circumstances and the property's value — broadly, 6% for a home under €150,000, 3.5% for certain buyers under 35, large families, buyers with a recognised disability or purchases in depopulated municipalities, and 2% for registered property professionals buying to resell within two years, capped at €500,000. None of them depend on where the buyer holds a passport.
New-build purchases are outside ITP altogether: they carry 10% IVA plus 1.2% AJD stamp duty.
The full picture, kept current, is in our guide to property taxes in Marbella and Spain.
Related: the Golden Visa is gone
The withdrawn article referred to the Golden Visa in passing, and did so loosely. For the record: Spain's investor residency route was abolished by Ley Orgánica 1/2025 of 2 January 2025, published in the BOE on 3 January 2025 and effective 3 April 2025. All investment routes closed, the €500,000 property route among them. Applications filed complete before that date are processed under the old rules, and permits already granted run their course. See our Spanish Golden Visa 2026 update.
Why this was withdrawn
This article was produced by an automated newsroom pipeline that was asked to file "a specific story from the last 14 days" without access to any actual news wire. Where it had no story, it composed one, and it dressed the invention in the vocabulary of real institutions — the Dirección General de Tributos, the Agencia Tributaria, the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the Colegio de Registradores. The numbers, the deadlines, the named court cases and the quoted officials in the withdrawn text were generated, not reported.
Two structural points are worth stating plainly, because they are what should have caught this before publication:
- The Dirección General de Tributos does not publish numbered "Circulars" that
rewrite a statute. It answers taxpayers through consultas vinculantes, cited in the form V1200-26. Binding tax rules in Spain arrive as a law, a decree, an order or a BOE-published resolution — each traceable to a dated BOE entry. - Administrative guidance cannot add a requirement that the statute does not contain, and cannot apply one retroactively. Any article claiming both at once is describing something that could not have happened.
We have found no BOE entry, no Junta de Andalucía publication and no professional commentary corresponding to the instrument this article described.
What we are doing about it
The pipeline that produced this article has been reviewed. Muse Marbella publishes tax and legal commentary because our clients make eight-figure decisions on it, and that is precisely why an invented circular is not a tolerable error. We would rather carry a visible retraction at this URL than quietly redirect it somewhere flattering.
If you took a decision, restructured a holding, delayed a completion or paid for advice on the strength of the withdrawn article, please contact us and we will put you in front of a qualified Spanish tax adviser at our expense.
For the current position on Spanish property taxation, see our guide to property taxes in Marbella and Spain and our Spanish Golden Visa 2026 update. Nothing on this page should be relied on as tax advice; Spanish tax treatment depends on personal circumstances and should be confirmed with a licensed asesor fiscal.