The president of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, Mònica Roca, ended her term at the head of the business organization yesterday with criticism of the Government’s management for having been unable to approve a law of Catalan chambers. “The Government, in any case, since it does not make decisions, it harms business, because the Chamber does not have the funding to carry out its functions”, explained Roca during the presentation of a balance sheet of the four years of management of the current management team, the candidacy promoted by the pro-independence organization ANC.
Roca is running for the next elections to the plenary session of the Chamber, although he has not clarified whether he wants to repeat as president. On whether the presentation of the balance sheet was a campaign act, he denied it and assured that it had been done on other occasions before the elections. The president of the Chamber added that, whoever wins the parliamentary elections, which will be held from September 15 to 20 in the 13 Catalan institutions, must work with the Government and the parties to unblock the law. “I hope and wish that once the (parliamentary) elections are over, the law will be activated, there will be someone in the presidency of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and the results that have come out,” said Roca.
In his opinion, it is a “frustration as a country” that after the decision of the Spanish Government, at the end of 2010, to eliminate the chamber quota, Catalonia is practically the only autonomy in Spain that does not have a law of chambers. “It is in no way acceptable that after having made a law in coordination with the Department of Business, a law that has the endorsement of the 13 Catalan chambers, we have not been able to push it forward”, he give an opinion
For months now, the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce has been defending that the future Catalan law on chambers of commerce, pending since 2014, has broad business support and an already fairly advanced wording, so it has been hoping since then that the main groups of the Parliament register a joint bill that allows the law to be unblocked.
The 13 Catalan chambers defend that this law incorporates funding formulas for the public functions entrusted to these corporations. For this reason, they expect the new law to provide for the payment of a minimum amount per voter, that is to say, for those natural or legal persons, national or foreign, registered in the electoral roll of these corporations under public law.
According to the figures published by the institution, during the 2019-2023 term the Chamber of Barcelona has provided services to more than 56,000 companies and promoted 45 projects.
Regarding the relations with the Chamber of Spain, where the institution lost the vice-presidency, Roca stated that they would like to recover it, even though it generates anxiety.
