Spain should give a change of direction to its industrial policy to maintain control over strategic sectors and reinforce the Spanishness of key multinationals. This is the conclusion reached today by several experts regarding foreign investments in essential industries for the country. The specialists have focused on Telefónica. But also in Catalonia and in its most important steel company. “With Celsa we are facing one of the very few cases in Europe in which a strategic company of a country and the leading industry of an autonomous community ends up controlled by opportunistic funds,” warned Jordi Alberich, vice president coordinator of the Institute of Strategic Studies of Development. of Treball. The concept of strategic autonomy is at the epicenter of the entire debate.
“It is difficult for me to think that Celsa will not end up in the hands of these funds,” Alberich warned. Some funds, he has argued, do not have a strategic vision of the future, but rather an “opportunistic short-term vocation.”
Alberich also considers it worrying that “a single judge” decides the future of a company so important for Catalonia and that, in addition, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank is among the creditor funds. You cannot imagine a similar situation with Santander or BBVA in a company from a German state.
The debate on strategic autonomy and the situation of Spanish companies in this context has been held in the General Council of Economists (CGE) and Telefónica, the company in which the State is considering investing, has also been discussed. Juan de la Cruz, director of the European Center for Economic Regulation and Competition, agrees that he considers it “essential that we strengthen our industrial capacities to be able to produce essential goods and services within the framework of open strategic autonomy.”
In the debate the example of France and its defense of nuclear energy was given. A country agreement that led Macron's government to completely nationalize the French electricity company EDF. “We need a country's industrial policy,” said De la Cruz. For the expert, it is a priority to reform the Industry Law, which dates back to 1992.
For Valentín Pich, president of the CGE, “the entry into Telefónica's shareholding by the Saudi group STC has revealed the weaknesses of the current legislation in this matter, as the Central Administration is forced to abide by a discretionary scope clause. , which can cause disincentives for foreign investments.” “It would be advisable, therefore, to have accurate legislation that does not allow arbitrariness in decisions and that, in turn, prioritizes the protection of our strategic sectors, especially those related to national defense, a factor of increasing importance in current times. ", has added.
Jordi Alberich believes, for his part, that the Government should have control over strategic sectors, such as energy, transport, communications, water, health or education. And he has also claimed to exercise the State's veto power over operations on essential multinationals.
Sara Baliña, number two of the Presidency's Prospective Office of the Government, also participated in the debate, who pointed out that, although the entry of foreign capital into large Spanish companies "is not at all a threat", it does pose the challenge of defend key sectors. “We need to focus on the production of those goods and services in which we already have a consolidated competitive advantage [this is the case of the agri-food or pharmaceutical sector], or in which it is necessary to have minimum production capacities given their relevance for the economy of the future [we can talk about renewable energies, semiconductors or biomedical products]. For Baliña “this reinforcement of our industrial capabilities must come accompanied by a revitalization of our relations with the outside world.”
