The first vice-president of the Government and acting Minister of Economy, Nadia Calviño, reiterated yesterday from New Delhi – after participating in the G-20 Summit – that neither the Ministry of Defense nor the Ministry of Commerce have yet received a official request of the Saudi STC in which it requests authorization to enter Telefónica after the purchase of 9.9% of its capital. This is how he detailed it in a press conference from the capital of India.
Calviño emphasized that the Government will apply all the necessary mechanisms to guarantee the protection of Spain’s strategic interests in view of this operation which, he stressed, must be handled through the “mechanisms available in Spain’s legal system “.
In this way, the vice-president specified that the official notification to the Government would be the “step” by which the evaluation process by the Executive would be launched. “We will analyze with all rigor this and other operations that take place and we will, of course, apply all the instruments available to defend the general interest and the strategic interest of our country, as we have done since the first day”, asserted Calviño .
The holder of the Economy portfolio in the Spanish Government confirmed that she did not maintain any contact with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salman, during the G-20 summit. Calviño headed the Spanish delegation at the summit after the president, Pedro Sánchez, tested positive for covid.
The decision on the future of Telefónica takes place in a European environment where mergers are difficult in the sector to protect themselves from investors from third countries. A year ago, in a Telefónica blog, the company’s managers pointed out that the European Commission’s barriers to mergers in the telecommunications sector prevent eliminating the current fragmentation that weakens operators in their income and places them in a position more “vulnerability” to attempts to buy funds from other markets.
The company’s Public Policy managers, Nuria Talayero and Dácil Jiménez, analyzed the risks for European operators that Brussels is so restrictive with consolidations in this market. “The current approach to regulation and European competition policy continues to encourage artificial competition through an increase in the number of operators and asymmetric preferential treatment towards new entrants”, the directives point out. According to his opinion, the value of the European telecommunications sector has been progressively reduced, due to the fall in income and return on investments”.
