Two years of political tension plunging the economy into uncertainty and a balance that, between Catalan businessmen, is summed up between a "could have been worse" and a "that the judgment of the trial for the process does not repeat on October 1, 2017 ».

In the days and weeks after the independence challenge, 2,536 companies moved their headquarters by adding the prosecutor outside Catalonia to Andalusia (165), Aragón (194), Baleares (134); Valencian Community (279) and, above all, Madrid (1,457). What seemed impossible became a reality and the business and financial groups of greater Catalan roots, left. If there were doubts, they vanished when they saw that the list was headed by La Caixa, Banco Sabadell, Cellnex, Catalana Occidente ...

In total, to date, 5,454 companies from Catalonia have left for the rest of Spain, according to data from the Registrar's Association. "Beyond the catacrak that was produced by the departure of the companies, the operational consequences have not been noticed," they explain in Foment del Traball. Josep Sánchez Llibre, president of the Catalan employers of medium and large companies, has already announced that his main work is the return of the exodus of headquarters.

«Today, nothing the worst that could happen has materialized," says the employer in reference to the departure of decision centers, contracting services associated with the activity of companies or loss of the contribution that companies generally make to their environment ... "The problem is if this situation lengthens over time because in that case there would be that transfer of value," they admit.

The opinion is similar among small companies grouped in the Cecot confederation. "We have 40 boards of directors and in no sector have we identified an impact due to the political tension of these two years," explains its president David Garrofe. On a 24-month panorama, the memory of this entrepreneur is that the effect of the greatest institutional challenge to democracy has been "neutral."

However, it does admit the "uncertainty" of the months that followed from October 2017 until the following year. On the political level, this period coincided with the application of article 155 of the Constitution, whereby all Catalan institutions were intervened by the Central Administration for eight months, until June 2018. Catalan GDP, which advanced throughout the previous year at full speed of economic recovery and at the head of the acceleration of the whole of Spain, it went from growing 1% in the semester to ending at 0.4%. They were, according to Garrofe, "three months of braking" that he hopes will not be repeated in the coming weeks with the sentence for the trial of those events. The fall into the abyss that also dragged the rest of the Spanish economy slowed down, but the stabilization after the "shock" of those three months of 2017 has not meant that more than 31.4 billion euros return in deposits that, according to the Bank of Spain, left accounts located in Catalonia for fear of a corralito associated with independence. Nor does Catalonia occupy the outstanding leadership it maintained for its potential.

"It is expected that all this will happen and that normality will be restored, that politicians will lower the tension tone and find a way to take measures in 2020 to face the economic risks that appear around them," they say in Foment del Traball.

"At the business level, there is uneasiness because the stoppages that come to disrupt economic activity," he explains. "The Catalan businessman expects political responses that do not arrive, the reestablishment of dialogue channels ... but it is not seen for now and what he remembers is the Italian model, where politics is chaos but companies work," he says.

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