On a day in which the Ibex remained flat, the shares of BBVA and Banco Sabadell fulfilled the script expected for the day after a preliminary offer to buy. The acquirer (BBVA) fell by 3.8%, while the absorbed (Sabadell) rose by 3.6%, so that the premium today is already less than 9%.
Yesterday the Catalan businessmen, in line with the warnings made by the employer Foment, the unions and the Generalitat, showed their doubts about the project. “Banc Sabadell plays a fundamental role in the structuring of Catalan business, as it is a service bank focused on supporting the company, the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial ecosystem that we consider essential as an actor for economic development ”, declared the president of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, Josep Santacreu. “An absorption that would make Sabadell disappear or dilute this key role would be harmful in the Catalan economic and financial sphere”, he added.
More than half of the Spanish companies have Sabadell as one of the three or four banks they operate with. If it disappears, these companies will begin to concentrate more risk in a single entity, waiting to find an alternative, and there are none of great size and state presence outside of the three largest (CaixaBank, Santander and BBVA). Pere Cots, director of the financing area of ??the employer Pimec, pointed out that “anything that is concentration and loss of supply we cannot value positively. For SMEs, the reduction of entities is bad”. Cots specified that “we do not expect” that if the merger goes ahead, BBVA will reduce risk with the SMEs that are also Sabadell’s clients, but he does believe that the measure could “have some effect”.
The impact it may have on autonomous communities such as Catalonia, Valencia or Asturias must be analysed. Just yesterday, the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, and the president of the Valencian Business Confederation (CEV), Salvador Navarro, showed their “concern” about the possible merger between BBVA and Banco Sabadell, since the new group would come to concentrate 60% of the banking market in the Valencian Community and the headquarters of the second entity would no longer be in Alicante if it prospers.
They exposed it before an event organized by La Vanguardia in Valencia, in which the economic future of the community was analysed. “I didn’t like the news at all,” said Mazón, reports Héctor Sanjuán.
From the College of Economists of Catalonia, its president, Carles Puig de Travy, said that “we are in a situation of high concentration and it is necessary to analyze whether the operation would have an excessive impact on the market”. Puig de Travy indicated that in operations of this type the board of directors must analyze the effect it may have on “the bank’s different interest groups: shareholders, workers, customers, suppliers and society in general”. In the case of workers, the effect is a cut in jobs that has yet to be negotiated, but which, taking into account the percentages of other recent mergers, could impact on 15% of the combined workforce, about 5,900 people . Union sources said yesterday that they had not received any clarification from the management of either bank.
In the case of customers, the impact of the merger would come from the expected closure of offices, which if again compared to what happened in the absorption of Bankia by CaixaBank, could force the closure of one of every four branches, about 800 in total.
From Seville, the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, expressed the prudence of the Central Government in the face of the operation, although he assessed it as good news to have “solid, cutting-edge and leading financial institutions in the EU and in the world”.
