The ruling of the High Court of Justice of the Balearic Islands (TSJIB) that requires the re-examination of 600 applications for VTC licenses in Mallorca has set off alarm bells in the cab sector of the Balearic Islands, particularly in Ibiza.
The ruling, which the Govern has announced it will appeal, does not affect Ibiza’s cases, but it does call into question the fact that administrations, in this case the Govern, use fixed ratios between cabs and VTCs to deny licenses. This is the same argument used by the European courts.
The TSJIB overturns the resolution that rejected six requests for 100 licenses and forces to re-examine the case without applying the ratio of 12.6 cabs for each VTC, understanding that it was used automatically, without justifying “compelling reasons of general interest”.
It also specifies that these applications, submitted before 2024, are not covered by the moratorium of Law 1/2024, which only stops new applications at a later date.
“It’s not pleasant news. In fact, it is to throw his hands to his head. We are very concerned about the route this could take,” Toni Roig, president of the Taxi Federation of Ibiza and Formentera (FTIE), told La Voz de Ibiza.
Roig said from the cab sector are still expectant what will happen after the Govern announced that it will appeal the ruling. And, although he points to caution, he does not rule out that such a measure will have its consequences in Ibiza: “Let’s see what the judicial route it has, but hopefully it will not affect our sector.”
A look at the state of the matter in the courts suggests that the recent ruling of the TSJIB is not a minor precedent.
Thousands of licenses in dispute
According to data published in September by Radio Ibiza, the Consell de Ibiza currently has 89 open court cases related to VTC licenses.
In 2024, 16,354 applications for VTC licenses were filed on the island; of these, only 365 were authorized and the rest were rejected. Of the litigation in progress, 81 processes refer to 5,782 licenses that were denied and another 73 that have been suspended, while eight appeals have been filed against 141 licenses granted.
The Consell has publicly defended a hard line: the island’s director of Transport, Roberto Algaba, has insisted that the institution maintains a “firm position” of not authorizing more licenses because, according to his criteria, the legal ratio of VTC is already amply met and many requests are due to speculative strategies to profit from the authorizations. That threshold, set in Decree 43/2014, is 6.74 cabs for each VTC in Ibiza, when in practice the island already moves in a ratio close to 1 VTC for every 3 cabs.
A good part of the Consell’s policy to reject new VTC has been based on the argument that the legal ratio has already been covered, as the institution itself has publicly explained. It remains to be seen to what extent that same reasoning, now questioned in the ruling of the 600 VTCs in Mallorca, is present -and with what weight- in the resolutions that have ended up in court.
The tension goes back years. In 2023, the Councilor for Mobility, Mariano Juan, had already warned that the Consell would deny “each and every one” of the more than 12,000 applications for VTC licenses that collapsed the department, considering it “unacceptable” that the administration would be paralyzed to “speculate and make money” with these titles.
In 2020, following a Supreme Court ruling, the Consell de Ibiza began processing 436 VTC licenses that had been requested years earlier, and a first company managed to reactivate 30 requests that had initially been denied because the vehicles were not domiciled on the island, IB3 reported.
Uber and a model designed to tie VTCs to each island.
This summer, the Taxi Federation of Ibiza and Formentera (FTIE) has described as “considerable and increasingly serious nonsense” the expansion of Uber on the island and denounces that many vehicles operating through the platform “may not have the required VTC license”, with a drop in turnover of around 25% and a plunge in calls to the booking center from 60,000 in May 2024 to 32,000 this year, as explained by its president, Toni Roig, on Radio Ibiza.
In this context, the Govern is working on a new regulation of cabs and VTC that aims to give more control to the councils and municipalities and curb the advance of these platforms. As advanced by La Voz de Ibiza, the text sets objective criteria to determine how many licenses can be granted in each modality and, above all, introduces a key rule: once the new regulation comes into force, VTCs can only operate on the island of which they have authorization. The text contemplates only one month for possible changes of domicile.
So far, the current regulations allow VTCs to operate in all the islands of the archipelago, something especially relevant if we take into account that in the Balearic Islands there are 768 VTC licenses granted and more than half of them (about 400) are domiciled in Ibiza.
The new regulation aims to cut this inter-island mobility and tie each authorization to its territory, while the regulation – currently in the final stretch of its processing after receiving favorable reports from IB Dona and the Consell de Consum – establishes that the island councils will set quotas for VTC licenses based on parameters such as the Human Pressure Index, the public transport network, large infrastructures and environmental impact.
Cross interests between Ibiza and Mallorca
Another fact that illustrates the business appetite and the connection between islands: according to La Voz de Ibiza, companies and freelancers based in Ibiza have taken 18 of the 75 seasonal VTC licenses that the Government will grant for the last season in Mallorca, almost a quarter of the total. In Ibiza, on the other hand, no seasonal VTC licenses are granted despite the historical claim of the sector.
In the case of fixed licenses, the new rule of “each VTC on its island” that the Government wants to implement will limit, on paper, the possibility of “migrating” vehicles from one island to another according to demand.
