A and J are two wealthy brothers from Barcelona, with renowned surnames, well known in high society, the last offspring of an industrial saga who, after recently getting rid of their dwindling but emblematic company, sold to a multinational, have settled with their families in Dubai to enjoy the income without paying taxes. An extreme version of the internal tax exodus that a part of the Catalan elites has practiced by moving to Madrid to take advantage of the benevolent treatment for the patrimony, donations and inheritances of the most parasitic community in Spain. The rebellion against what they call tax hell.
An issue that Ferrovial's announcement to move its headquarters to the Netherlands places it in a new perspective with a high political charge. Is the search for a tax haven the common denominator of both episodes? Are the two part of the growing global rebellion of the elites, the beneficiaries of globalization, against the tax and regulatory pressure of the states, the patrician face of galloping populism? Is capitalism mutating towards a model of wealthy elites and large corporations, increasingly gigantic, governed exclusively by financial criteria and oblivious to the needs of other companies, the middle classes and society as a whole?
In the case of Ferrovial, taxes are part of the equation for sure, as the Netherlands offers a large number of advantages in this area, to companies and individuals. There will be a tax revenue. But the decision of Rafael del Pino, president of the construction company, the first shareholder and visible face of the family that controls the majority of the capital and the third largest Spanish fortune, is of great importance. In practice, it means giving up the protection of a State, changing your passport and traveling the world with another, that of a country from which you cannot expect the complicity that you have enjoyed with Spanish political power. A symptom of the financial mutation of large industrial companies that bring to a paroxysm the rule of maximum benefit (fiscal, stock market listing and hypothetical sale of the company) for the shareholder. Del Pino seeks even more benefits, tax and some more. An unappealable logic, but that he cannot expect everyone's blessing.
The company has argued that the move will make it easier for them to land in the US, as well as that there is more legal certainty in Amsterdam than in Madrid. Very forced. Unless it is thought that Spain is not part of the common European space.
It should not refer to the fact that in Spain corruption is comfortable. He has known it for a long time. She herself was the protagonist of her in one of her great episodes, the one at the Palau de la Música, epitome of 3% and in which her executives saved her skin thanks to the prescription of crimes. She also participated in the large cartel of construction companies that agreed on prices in public tenders, as the Competition Commission discovered.
The news has made Pedro Sánchez feel bad, who has reacted by attributing it exclusively to the desire to pay less taxes. The clash with businessmen to a certain extent and the middle classes dislike paying taxes. The attitude of the Government heralds a long legal and tax dispute. The Tax Agency may consider that there are no real economic reasons that justify the transfer and therefore prevent the operation from taking advantage of the tax benefits of mergers and oblige it to pay taxes for the increases in equity that arise when updating the value of the assets. assets. It is also possible that the change of headquarters is considered fictitious if the top executives, starting with Del Pino, do not change their tax residence and spend more than half the year in the Netherlands.
But the news of the transfer of Ferrovial is also disturbing for the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, caught between her dream vision of an unbeatable Madrid paradise to attract the world's rich and her unbridled desire to attack the president of the Government on behalf of his clashes with businessmen and the alleged Spanish legal insecurity, one of the arguments used by the company. Madrid has difficulties to play in this global league.
But neither should it be a tasteful dish for the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, since it implies that the Del Pino family either does not trust the Galician to win the next general elections, or that if he did, it would be inconsequential for the purposes that they care. In addition, the memory of the fiscal policy of Cristóbal Montoro, Mariano Rajoy's finance minister, is still very much alive among the wealthy in the capital, who always accused him of "camouflaged social and social democratic resentment."
There are many private testimonies from big businessmen showing sympathy with Del Pino. Some of them have sent you explicit messages. Neither many nor few, but significant. Enough to think that a resentment against the State has been incubated in the patriciate of money.
It is not just a Spanish dynamic. Trumpism was gestated in the Tea Party, a shaker that stirred up the idea of tax cuts for the rich. As in France, where the pressure in favor of light taxation always pushes President Emmanuel Macron. Even in the United Kingdom, large corporations are studying emigration movements to the Netherlands to avoid the increase in corporate tax, another of the unforeseen consequences of a Brexit that had promised tax gifts that just by announcing them have taken Boris Johnson ahead and Lizz Truss.
It grows with inequality. The more your wealth increases, the more unbearable taxes and regulations become. And it looks for escapes in the heat of the freedom of the movement of capitals. As Warren Buffett said, "There is a class war, to be sure, but it is my class, the rich class, that is waging the war, and we are winning."
