Congress and the Senate have decided to transfer their treasury accounts to the Bank of Spain to avoid the commissions imposed by private banks.
The Cortes Generales have called a new contest to manage the bank accounts of the Cortes as a whole, the Congress, the Senate, the Central Electoral Board and the Ombudsman and avoid those charges. Until it is resolved, the funds of the five institutions have been deposited in the Bank of Spain.
Banking entities charge commissions on deposits from their institutional clients. These charges have been increasing and several institutions have decided to take measures so that it is not burdensome for them to have public money in private banks. Its refuge is the Bank of Spain, which has seen how the deposits of clients of the Administration have been increasing.
Thus, according to the latest data from the supervisor, the Bank of Spain had 73.9 billion euros from public institutions last October, almost double the 37.7 billion it held in July.
The contest has been carried out by urgent processing. The Courts themselves argue that it is necessary to “reduce the precarious situation of the contract of the previous awardee due to its onerousness, as a consequence of the demands of the European Central Bank in relation to the ease of deposit.”
The contract, which will be paid by the budget remnants of the Cortes, has a base bidding budget of 682,351.78 euros. Unlike previous calls of this type, this time the entities competing to win the contract are not set as a requirement to open offices in both Chambers, although it will be assessed whether they include it in their offer.
The technical specification sheet details that the successful bidder must be in charge of opening and maintaining the five main current accounts and the auxiliary accounts that each of these institutions may require.
And there it already specifies that the payments to these accounts will be produced mainly by transfers from the Public Treasury or entry of checks from the Bank of Spain or any other that is derived from the treasury of the Chambers, the JEC and the Ombudsman.
The tender specifications make it clear that all these accounts “must be exempt from all kinds of expenses and administration, maintenance and overdraft fees” and that commissions or expenses for transfers, the purchase and sale of foreign currency, income in cash, the issuance of checks and their use, that of nominative checks by the bank, payments in foreign currency or the intervention of intermediary banks.