Total divorce between family businesses and the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. The president of the Family Business Institute (IEF), Andrés Sendagorta, complained yesterday to the fifty attendees at the closing ceremony of the XXV congress of this organization that Sánchez declined to participate in the annual meeting for the fourth consecutive time. He has not been present at a family business congress since 2018.
“We would have loved to have had the presence of the president. And I want to assure you that next year we will invite you again”, he said in his Sendagorta speech. She detailed it just before notifying the Government that it is necessary to flee from "the occurrences and bet on rigor." It was a clear reference to the new tax on large fortunes that the Ministry of Finance has improvised to harmonize the taxation of assets between the autonomous communities through the back door.
“The pandemics have not been able to kick us out. Neither will inflation, nor the energy crisis, nor, I hope, will the fiscal tidal wave that we are experiencing these days”, he declared. The new tax measures will imply that businessmen who have not paid assets for a decade, residents of Madrid, will once again pay a tax on wealth.
The president of the IEF demanded in his speech “reflection and rigorous analysis when defining measures that affect our activity. That, when making decisions, when legislating, we do not create competitive barriers that put us in unfavorable positions with respect to those that exist in other countries around us”.
Sendagorta went further and wanted to break the topics that have been launched these weeks regarding the debate on the tax pressure of large estates. In his opinion, family entrepreneurs have "nothing to do with black legends full of cigars and top hats that some try to spread." For this reason, he asked "to avoid populist temptations of all kinds."
The Family Business Institute has always been especially belligerent in defending a fiscal model in which entrepreneurs are not harmed because they consider that it is a brake on competition with the rest of the surrounding countries.
Yesterday there were several round tables in which businessmen explained their personal experiences within the professional activity. The colloquium on the succession process at Catalana Occidente and Grupo Pikolín stood out.
Asked about how being listed conditions the company, the president of Catalana Occidente, José María Serra, replied that "in making decisions we do not allow ourselves to be influenced by the market, whether it likes it or not". His son Hugo Serra, CEO of the insurer, acknowledged that one of the big differences with his father is that he makes decisions faster.
