It follows it very up on the list of concerns of some business and union organizations. Those responsible for stating on Tuesday their concern for the possible consequences of this bank concentration operation have been the president of the Catalan employer Foment del Treball and vice president of CEOE, Josep Sánchez Llibre, and the secretary general of UGT, Pepe Álvarez. Both have been resounding in their warnings: if the hostile OPA thrives, and numerous jobs will disappear.
“In the bank mergers two and two never add four, of that sum can be two, two and a half or three at most, but never four,” said Sánchez Llibre, who has gone beyond. “If Sabadell disappears, businessmen would have to reinvent the creation of a new bank as did the Catalan textile entrepreneurs 150 years ago,” he said.
Those 75,000 million, according to the Catalan employer leader, are half of all the credit that grants small and medium enterprises and autonomous workers. Sánchez Llibre has assured that to calculate this amount it has been based on his “own experience.” And he pointed out that if this occurs, “the same thing that happened after the crisis of Lehman Brothers in 2008 will happen.” Between 2010 and 2020 numerous companies had to close due to lack of financing, “he defended.
At this point, both Sánchez Llibre and Álvarez have remembered resenting by the two organizations they direct, asking for precautionary measures to stop the operation at least until the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) is pronounced. Both demands have been admitted to processing and are pending resolution. Álvarez, who has reiterated “clearly” the opposition of the OPA union, said that this Tuesday he spoke “on behalf of the workers of the two financial entities”, who “already have a very high workload, because Spain is the EU country with less bank branches per inhabitant.”
“We play the ability that the Spanish productive fabric has financing in good condition, we are playing jobs and the physical health of workers in the sector,” said the UGT leader. Álvarez has also spoken on behalf of the Association of Autonomous of the Upta Union and has denounced that, if the OPA, “the credit to the collective would suffer significantly.”
Common complaint
Sánchez Llibre and Álvarez have made these statements in a day on the Financial market analysis. Impact on the Spanish SMEoganized by the employer of small and medium -sized companies Cepyme, together with the Catalan and Galician employers. The presidents of both territorial business organizations have left the internal differences on Tuesday to support the claim to access the financing of SMEs. Both employers have publicly supported Angela de Miguel, rival of the president of Cepyme, Gerardo Cuerva, to preside over this employer.
For its part, Cuerva recalled that SMEs are still about 15,000 million below the access to credit they had before the pandemic. And although he has been in favor of small businesses exploreing forms of alternative financing, he has recognized that most SMEs and freelancers use commercial banking to finance. Moreover, it has exalted the role of these entities not only as financial instruments but as “service providers” of SMEs, such as charges or advice, which “in the end makes commercial banks into partners.”
After Cuerva, other employer leaders who have participated in the day criticized the BBVA OPA on Sabadell for the bank concentration that it implies, as the president of the employer of Galicia, Juan Manuel Vieites; or the first vice president of the Chamber Council of the Valencian Community and president of the Chamber of Commerce of Alicante, Carlos Bath.
