Stampede on as Catalonia’s firms flee to safer climes

THE flight of banks and top corporations from Catalonia is turning into a stampede as the Spanish state tightens the garrote on the rebel government in Barcelona.

Gas Natural, Spain’s top gas and electricity group, is drawing up contingency plans to relocate its headquarters as the Catalan “Generalitat” threatens to declare unilateral independence next week. The infrastructure giant Abertis is taking similar steps, as is insurer Catalana Occidente, and the sparkling wine group Freixenet. “Independence is no joke. It’s a true catastrophe, a non-starter,” said Jose Luis Bonet, Freixenet’s president.

“People are getting frightened. I think it is time for the politicians to stop gazing at their navels and think about the citizens they are supposed to serve.”

Catalonia’s biggest bank — CaixaBank, the largest internal lender in Spain by branch networks — held an emergency board meeting on Friday to switch its legal registration to Palma in Majorca, where it first began as a pension and savings bank in 1904.

The Spanish government has rushed through an executive decree allowing decisions to be taken without a vote by shareholders, effectively rewriting the laws of commercial governance on a whim. Telegraph