Execution of final judgment

The case revolves around a valuation report (that is, the official valuation that serves as a basis, among other things, for calculating taxes). A company obtained a final judgment from the TSJ of the Basque Country that annulled the report applied to a Property of Special Characteristics and ordered to revert the actions to redo it correctly.

If a report is wrong, it is annulled and the Administration has to redo the work. The problem came later, already in the execution phase of that judgment. Instead of merely redoing the report as ordered, the Administration approved a new report , but also notified it stating that it would have retroactive effects from January 1,2020, that is, from the same date when the annulled report had started to be applied.

The company understood that this was overstepping and promoted an execution incident stating, essentially, that the Administration was taking advantage of the execution to impose backward effects that were not in the ruling. The TSJ did not side with them, and that is why the company went to the Supreme Court (TS).

The TS upholds the appeal, recalls that a final judgment must be complied with in its own terms , and that in execution, new burdens, conditions, or consequences that the ruling did not foresee cannot be introduced. Therefore, it concludes that it is not possible for the Administration, in that phase, to approve a new report with retroactivity relying on a strict interpretation of art. 39.3 of the LPAC. Doing so violates the intangibility of the final judgment and the right to the effective judicial protection . Consequently, the TS annuls what was resolved in execution regarding that retroactivity and declares the administrative acts null at that point.