In , some Catalan separatists started paying their federal taxes into the Catalan state treasury rather than to the Spanish government. This was a mostly-symbolic action, as the Catalan treasury just forwarded the money to their Spanish counterparts, but it was designed to prepare for the day when a Catalan separatist government would cut off Madrid for good.
The separatists had success at the ballot box and the Catalan parliament voted to declare independence, but Spain then dissolved the state government, and imprisoned its leaders and/or forced them into exile. As a protest movement, the independence campaign is still active, but the independence of the state government appears to have been successfully suppressed by Spain at this point.
And now, one of the early adopters of tax resistance — a restaurant in Siurana which had been paying its taxes to Catalonia — has been forced to close after the tax agency rescinded its tax identification number and froze its accounts.
The owners of the restaurant (Andreu Bartolomé and Maria Casademunt) had moved on to a more extreme form of tax resistance than paying symbolically to the Catalan treasury. Rather than pay taxes there, only to see the money eventually go to Spain after all, they began to redirect their taxes directly to schools, hospitals, and other social programs in Catalonia, and then filed the receipts for these donations with the tax agency in lieu of their taxes.
