The Spanish Government to present a new digital tax this year

"The idea is to present it as soon as possible and to have an effect in 2019 and successively," Escolano said.

Spain's economy minister Román Escolano said on Saturday that the government wants to present a new digital tax this year that will hurt technology firms, with the aim of entering into force in 2019.

Escolano hoped to be able to approve soon a new tributary figure that contributes to paying in part the rise of the pensions that gather the general budgets of the State that the Government hopes to approve in the next weeks.

"The idea is to present it as soon as possible and to have an effect in 2019 and successively," Escolano said in Sofia, where he attended an Ecofin meeting in which an initiative to tax large multinationals was addressed.

The Spanish minister indicated that with this figure, for which he hopes to obtain the greatest political consensus, Spain would enter the group of European countries that already have taxes in this area.

Meanwhile, in Bulgaria, the European Commission's plan to tax multinationals temporarily before having a long-term solution generated skepticism among some countries and in the OECD, the world body that sets the rules on fiscal matters.

The Commission's initiative involves a 3 percent tax on the digital revenues of large multinationals such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which are accused of benefiting from an outdated European fiscal system.

"It does not make sense from the point of view of equity and social justice that the taxation and the support of public charges only fall on the old economy," Escolano said.

(With inputs from Reuters)