The plenary session of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce has today approved the appointment of Anna Navarro, Vice President of Procore Technologies, and Laura Carnicero, Vice President of Human Resources at Seat, as new members of the Fira de Barcelona Board of Directors. They will replace Kim Faura and Pedro Fontana, who have already exhausted all renewal possibilities.
The plenary session also approved the renewal as directors of the Fira of Luis Conde, Agustín Cordón and Miquel Martí for a period of four more years.
This clears up the situation after months of blockade waiting for the Chamber to decide and above all agree on its candidates with the Generalitat and the Barcelona City Council, the other two institutions that participate in the Fira.
Laura Carnicero, PhD in industrial engineering from the UPC, has been Executive Vice President of People and Organization at Seat since July last year. She joined the company in 1999, where she has held various positions in areas such as production, product strategy, and human resources. She is the first woman to access the position of vice president.
Anna Navarro, who uses the professional name of Anna Schlegel, has a degree in English and German Philology from the UB. Currently, she is vice president of Procore, a California company dedicated to the development of construction management programs. She is also the chief executive of the NGO Women in Technology. Before joining Procore Technologies, she worked at Cisco Systems, Xerox, VMware, VeriSign and NetApp. In 2020 she was chosen as the most influential woman in the world of technology and in 2021 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi from the Generalitat.
The board of directors of the Fira, currently chaired by Pau Relat, is the management body made up of businessmen or representatives of the economic world. It corresponds to the Chamber to propose the directors, but always in a manner agreed with the political institutions. After this Wednesday’s decision, the council is made up of Mar Alarcón, Laura Carnicero, Luis Conde, Agustín Cordón, Helena Guardans, Miquel Martí, Anna Navarro and Manel Vallet, in addition to the president Pau Relat.
The members of the council are appointed for a period of four years, and may be renewed in this position only for two more periods of the same duration.
The changes must now be ratified by the General Council of the Fira, the highest decision-making body, in which the Chamber, the City Council and the Generalitat are represented. It is chaired by the mayor Ada Colau and it will finally be able to meet in the coming weeks, after a whole year in 2022 without holding a meeting, not even to approve the accounts and the budget for this 2023. The reason for the delay: the blockade of the Chamber to the renewal of the council.
