The recent 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 Balearic cab industry. The sector fears that a domino effect could be generated that would imply in the short term the review of thousands of other licenses in Mallorca and also in Ibiza.
According to La Voz de Ibiza, the Independent Taxi Federation of the Balearic Islands (FITIB) has held in the last hours a meeting in the Parliament with its head lawyer, José María Baño, officials of the Government and the head of the Legal Service of the community to analyze the real scope of the ruling and prepare its strategy to legally stop a flood of more VTC licenses in the archipelago.
In that meeting the concern was expressed that the problem could go far beyond the 600 licenses affected by the ruling. FITIB manages the scenario that the logic of the TSJIB -which prevents applying the moratorium of Law 1/2024 to applications filed in 2022 and 2023- ends up impacting on a block of about 3,600 VTC requests, mainly in Mallorca that were suspended.
Alert in Ibiza
The federation has begun to coordinate by islands: it held a meeting with the presidents of the associations of Mallorca and a videoconference with representatives of the cab of Ibiza, fearing that the same judicial criteria could be extended to applications filed in the Pitiusa Mayor.
The federation’s cab drivers are working on the hypothesis that around 6,000 suspended VTC licenses could be affected if the same legal thesis of the recent TSJIB ruling is replicated.
That fear does not start from zero. As Radio Ibiza published, the Consell insular is currently facing 89 court cases linked to VTC licenses, after a 2024 in which 16,354 applications were registered on the island, of which only 365 were authorized and the rest were rejected or suspended.
In 2023, the then councilor for Mobility, Mariano Juan, had already warned that the Consell would deny “each and every one” of the more than 12,000 accumulated VTC applications, considering it “unacceptable” that the administration would be used to “speculate and make money” with the licenses.
Domino effect
Cab concerns are focused on the possible “domino effect” of the 600 VTC ruling. The ruling orders to
The federation considers the situation to be serious and will work on this front in the coming weeks, in dialogue with different political actors to obtain support.
The Balearic cab movement comes in parallel to the announcement of the Government, which has decided to appeal the ruling of the TSJIB and has described the ruling as “unfair” for the cab, understanding that it opens the door to a massive entry of VTC if the regulatory framework is not clarified. While the Executive prepares this appeal and accelerates the new regulation that will link the VTC to each island and allow setting quotas by territory, the federation refines its own plan to try to avoid that the 600 licenses that have detonated the conflict are only the first chapter of a battle for thousands of authorizations throughout the community.
