Budget Bill: another six-month delay on the way for the Sugar and Plastic Taxes

A further six-month extension is on the cards for the plastic and sugar taxes. The proposal under consideration as part of the budget bill (as reported by *Il Sole 24 Ore* on 22 October) has also been confirmed by the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of Forza Italia, Antonio Tajani, just a few hours before the majority meeting scheduled for 6.30 pm ahead of the finalisation of the Budget Bill expected in the Council of Ministers (the likely date could be Wednesday afternoon). ‘Given that plastics is a sector you are also involved in, there will be no plastic tax; we will postpone,’ explained Tajani, speaking at the Federchimica public meeting currently taking place in Milan, ‘the introduction of the plastic tax and the sugar tax for at least another six months, then we’ll see. I am in favour of postponing it for a year, so in six months’ time, if we are still in government, I believe we will postpone it further.” In the meantime, “there will be no plastic tax for the next six months”.

Postponing the implementation until July 2027 would mark the ninth extension (eight have been counted by the Catholic University’s Observatory on Italian Public Accounts) for the two ‘virtuous’ taxes introduced in 2020 by the Conte government, on the one hand to discourage the consumption of sugary drinks and tackle obesity, and on the other to curb the use of single-use plastic products. It will, however, be a six-month extension: their entry into force would, in fact, be postponed from 1 January 2027 to 30 June of that year. With a view to targeting the tenth (the one that would even be worth a star, as with league titles), also bearing in mind Tajani’s comments that they will then come into force later this year.

The two Confindustria associations, Assobibe (the national trade association representing companies that produce and sell soft drinks in Italia) and Unionplast (the trade association representing the Italian plastics processing industry) had called for the permanent removal of the two taxes from the forthcoming Budget Bill. In their view, a timeframe of just six months merely prolongs a devastating period of uncertainty for businesses, holding investment, production and jobs to ransom.

But it is not just the Sugar Tax and the Plastic Tax that are on the table for the budget. One of the possible measures strongly backed by Tajani is the revaluation of business assets. ‘We will try to make some decisions – for example, the revaluation of capital; I believe I have also convinced Minister Giorgetti on this point. It is not always easy; they try to keep a tight grip on the purse strings,’ said Tajani during the Federchimica assembly, referring to the possibility of revaluing real estate assets in companies’ balance sheets. The minister cited, by way of example, the value of the industrial units used by chemical companies.