A process of cross-checking Tax Agency and island councils' data has revealed some 8,700 illegal holiday lets in the Balearics.
Last September, the government announced that there would be a sharing of data to find out if properties advertised on websites were registered for the payment of tourist tax.
Under a European ruling of April 2022, intermediaries (i.e. the websites) are obliged to provide tax information. And the process has been streamlined since September as the result of an agreement between the Balearic government and Booking.com. This was before new EU regulations related to transparency of short-term rental accommodation.
The trawl of data has detected properties for which the tourist tax is paid but are not registered with the island councils. There are also those properties that are registered but for which the tax isn't paid.
The figure of 8,700 isn't definitive as an estimate for Ibiza has been made based on extrapolating data for the other islands; the Ibiza data are still being analysed. It is also not definitive because, as the government is well aware, there are properties that aren't advertised on websites such as AirBnB and Booking. There are clearly properties that are neither registered nor pay tourist tax.
The councils are responsible for the sanctioning of illegal holiday lets.
The 8,700, it has to be said, are way lower than the 235,000 that the housing minister, Marta Vidal, said there were last October, a number that was highly questionable to say the least.