In 2024 the Madrid City Council asserted that, by making public the maintenance of the M-30, residents would save 55 million euros per year. The plan was to buy 20% of the M-30’s management from the company Emesa, formed by Ferrovial and the ACS group, and to which it pays those 55 million euros annually.
In December 2025 the M-30 effectively became a public enterprise, but along the way it left behind a ‘little hole’ in the form of a debt that the City Council has forgiven to its partners: 112 million euros.
Since the M-30 is now public, the City Council has decided to forgive the bill
To set the context. The M-30 is one of those roads that originated in Madrid in 2007 under the tenure of Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, already complex in its characteristics, and which ended up indebting the City Council by billions of euros at a time when the EU did not permit cities to reach such figures.
After nearly two decades of being privately held at 20%, the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, has decided to make the M-30 fully public starting January 1, 2026 under the name Calle 30. To do so he had to buy the remaining 20% of the private management (the other 80% was already owned by the City) from the Emesa company for 103 million euros.
But it has cost a bit more. An investigation by El Mundo reveals that the successive mayors who have led Madrid from 2017 to the present have been pressing Emesa, its private partners, for a debt of 112 million euros in relation to the electricity bill for the M-30, which has grown since 2005 – when the mixed Calle 30 company was created – following Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón’s major reform.
But now that the company is 100% public and given what has been observed, Emesa is not going to assume that bill, and the City Council has decided to forgive it. According to the city council to El Mundo, it has already renounced claiming that money, as there is no point in doing so. In fact, it says it only pursued it—for a decade—”out of legal caution”.
A real bureaucratic tangle dating back to 2005, in which a contradiction in the Pliego de Cláusulas Administrativas Particulares has kept passing the ball back and forth, with Emesa refusing to pay because “in 11 years, no one had ever claimed that bill.”
Images | Wikipedia/M. Peinado, Pexels
