In 2001, as financial director of Estudio Lamela Arquitectos, I collaborated with Ferrovial on the expansion of the Warsaw airport. The company began to expand internationally and evolve into what it is today, which bears little resemblance to the company he created. Raphael del pino father. The Spanish construction companies’ model is to bid with minimal margins even if it’s a loss, and then renegotiate upstream contracts with changes. A model that is very unprofitable and creates serious problems in many countries; From the Panama Canal to the high-speed train in Saudi Arabia.
Rafael del Pino Jr. retained the family business brand but radically changed the company. From installing wooden sleepers during the Franco regime to managing airports in the UK or highways in major countries around the world. It’s undoubtedly one of the flagship Spanish companies around the world, and that helps explain the turmoil its departure has caused.
This Spanish government response It looks more like an infidelity, a family or friend crisis than a business crisis. We Spaniards decided to voluntarily sign the Treaties of the European Union in 1986 and promised to abide by the rules as well as receive European funds. The main economic rule is the single market and perfect mobility of capital within the Union. When Ferrovial won the British airports competition, there was a nationalist backlash similar to that present in Spain. This ended with Brexit, which we now know was a wrong British decision with costs in terms of higher inflation, more financial instability and more expensive mortgages than in Spain.
Holland is a Union country and it is perfectly legal for a European company to decide to change its headquarters there.. Threats to penalize Ferrovial in public tenders also violate European standards. If these are met, they will delay the development of public affairs, because the company can appeal to all Spanish judicial authorities and ultimately to European courts, without which disclosure would be impossible with the maximum guarantee of legal certainty. foreign investment that our country has received and continues to receive since 1986.
Demonize companies
After the war in Ukraine, the government and The sharp rise in inflation decided to demonize companies and blame them for rising prices. and the evils of the Spaniards. This is reminiscent of PP’s demonization of renewable energy investments in 2012, which gave us a serious reputational problem for the Spanish brand and cost us ten years to recover international investment in renewable energy in our country.
The world has changed radically since the 1980s.. If a wealthy Latin American wants to buy a house in Madrid, he will not be able to avoid paying property taxes, because the asset, as the name suggests, cannot be moved. If you tax their securities; money stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc. will go to another country to pay tax. The same thing happens in companies. For example, they will go to Portugal, which has a left-wing government and a leader reminiscent of Felipe González and the PSOE of the eighties. Felipe removed all the barriers inherited from the Franco regime to make Spain an attractive country for foreign investment.
The government tried to confront the companies and Ferrovial’s crunch is the canary in the mine that stops his crowing and warns that there is a gas bomb.. I am writing this article from Israel, a global technological benchmark and start. The Israelis revise their model by mutating the model. reproducebecause they want to have large multinational companies that have their headquarters in Israel, have their best-paid employees there, and pay a lot of taxes to have good health and good public pensions.
Spain lagged behind in technological development and business growth. But we have multinational companies headquartered here, and that’s the big secret of the success of Madrid, Barcelona and now Malaga, which is starting to attract them.. Our politicians must assume that the world has changed. That a small country like Spain should be seduced by big companies that can set up headquarters and invest in any country. The question isn’t that Minister Nadia Calviño asks on a radio show, but who will stay here? The question that encompasses John Kennedy is: What will you do to get them to invest and have headquarters in Spain?