He has not wanted to reveal any of the names of the senior officials who will make up the team with which he will lead a department with four very relevant pillars: Innovation, Industry, Commerce and Tourism, but the independent Nuria Montes, without previous political experience, has “fished” out of the PP to sign a position that will be very relevant when coordinating an agenda that is expected to be complex, his Chief of Staff. This is Miguel Ángel Sánchez, from Ciudadanos, a party of which he was coordinator in Alicante.
Sánchez currently held a position as adviser to the Department of Tourism headed by the journalist Ana Poquet, now appointed by the PP, but in the previous term he was the right hand of Mari Carmen Sánchez, deputy mayor and mayor of Tourism, and was local coordinator of Ciudadanos until he resigned last October.
The new councilor has been surrounded by family, friends and former co-workers at an event held at the Casa de las Brujas in Alicante, one of the headquarters of the Generalitat in the city, which has become too small. The ministers Rafael Climent and Josefina Bueno, and the regional secretary of Tourism, Francesc Colomer, have intervened before her in the formal act of transfer of powers.
Colomer, who is very close to Montes due to the close collaboration that his department has maintained with the hotel association of which she has been general secretary until today, has considered his appointment as “a great success” by President Mazón, and has been full of praise about his professional capacity and his human quality.
Bueno and Climent have wished the new minister luck, they have offered her their full collaboration. Climent has even given him a voluminous documentation summarizing his eight-year work and a list of pending issues and their resolution period, “one billet”, as he himself has defined it, which included the part related to Employment, with the request that he transfer it to José Antonio Rovira, who assumes that department together with Education and Universities.
In his brief speech, Montes has limited himself to pointing out some generic purposes of his mandate: to strengthen the industry, to convert the Valencian Community “and particularly Alicante” into one of the “most important innovation poles in Europe and surely in the world”, contribute to the process of “revolution and digitization” of Commerce to adapt it to the new consumption models. He has given special thanks to Colomer’s work at the head of the Tourism Department, and has praised his “human height” and that of his predecessors, Bueno and Climent, demonstrated “in the difficulties that we have all gone through.”
After emotionally greeting numerous guests at the event, among whom were her parents, husband, friends and fellow students and colleagues, the head of Innovation, Industry, Commerce and Tourism has confirmed that she will keep her office in Alicante, but does not initially foresee the transfer of more departments to the city.
