While engines are warming up awaiting the visit of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, BBVA’s hostile takeover bid for Sabadell was yesterday the concrete connection with the reality of the economy at the Cercle meeting d’Economia, whose motto this year was more global ambitions. “The world on trial” is the slogan, a reference to the geostrategic and technological elements that challenge the current state of affairs on the globe.
The Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, ratified the Government’s opposition to the operation promoted by the bank chaired by Carlos Torres. A position that is not new. The significance of yesterday’s official words lay in the maintenance of the unwavering rejection, once the Catalan elections had passed. Well, there is a suspicion among some that once the electoral demands have passed, the executive may qualify the speech to end up giving its approval in the end, many months from now.
Also because they spoke out in the territory of the bank that had become prey to the attack, Sabadell. In the front row of the auditorium, the dome of the bank. Its president, Josep Oliu, former president of Cercle; also the CEO, César González-Bueno, successor in the same position to Jaume Guardiola, current president of the economic forum. Body’s statements yesterday were the closest thing to a notarial act of opposition to the takeover bid. The resistance to the landing accumulated renewed energy and allowed the minister to win favors among local notables.
The Barcelona economic world is somewhat misplaced about its role and Sabadell is one of its reference elements. The other, La Caixa, has recovered its role of great strategic relevance and it can be ventured that the accommodation of Spanish capitalism to the new air brought about by the conflictive world situation will largely involve a public policy agreement with the entity of the mironian star.
One might think that a successful resistance by Sabadell and the renewed luster of La Caixa could counteract the dominant feeling that the Catalan economy has lost steam and influence compared to the years prior to the prodigious decade of the process.
Yesterday’s day ended with the intervention of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the president of the PP. Guardiola received him with a summary of the latest Cercle opinion note. Among other things, he said that the recently completed Catalan electoral campaign had been little tense and in a climate of political normalization, the most critical phase of the process had already been overcome and the possibility of a possible unilateral decision by the Catalan institutions on the table had already been overcome. And he asked him to explain his proposals for the fit of Catalonia into Spain.
Feijóo repeated his speech from the previous day in Congress and left some pearls such as describing Barcelona as “one of the most unsafe cities in the European Union.” Of course, with caution, Feijóo leaned towards rejecting BBVA’s hostile takeover bid. It’s something.
