The president of the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona, ??Mònica Roca, yesterday closed her mandate at the head of the business organization with criticism of the Government’s management for having been unable to approve a Catalan chamber law. “The Government, in any case, by not making decisions harms the business community because the Chamber does not have the financing to carry out its functions,” explained Roca during the presentation of an assessment of the four years of management of the current management team, the candidacy promoted by the independence entity ANC.
Roca is running for the next elections to the plenary session of the Chamber, although he has not clarified whether he seeks to repeat the presidency. Asked if the presentation of the balance sheet was a campaign event, she denied it and assured that it had been carried out on other occasions before the elections. The president of the Chamber added that, whoever wins in the chamber elections that will be held from September 15 to 20 in the 13 Catalan institutions, they must work with the Government and the parties to unblock the law. “I hope and wish that once the (cameral) elections are over, the law will be activated, there will be whoever is in the presidency of the Chamber of Barcelona and the results that have come out will 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 camera quota, Catalonia is practically the only autonomy in Spain that does not have a camera law. “It cannot be tolerated in any way 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 said.
The Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona has been defending for months that the future Catalan law on chambers of commerce, pending since 2014, has broad business support and a drafting that is already quite advanced, so it has since hoped that the main groups in the Parliament will register a joint bill that allows the law to be unblocked. The 13 Catalan chambers defend that this law incorporates financing formulas for the public functions entrusted to these corporations. For this reason, they hope that the new law will provide for the payment of a minimum amount per voter, that is, for those natural or legal persons, national or foreign, registered on the electoral roll of these public law corporations.
According to figures published by the institution, during the 2019–2023 mandate the Chamber has provided services to more than 56,000 companies and has promoted 45 projects.
Regarding relations with the Chamber of Spain, where the institution lost the vice presidency, Roca stated that they would like to recover it, although it causes them anxiety.
