Rajoy’s plea to firms to stay

Barcelona – Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, pictured, yesterday urged businesses not to abandon Catalonia after hundreds of firms moved their legal headquarters away as uncertainty over the region’s independence drive drags on.

On his first visit to Catalonia since his government took direct control of the region in response to legislators declaring independence, Rajoy asked “all businesses that work or have worked in Catalonia not to go”.

Rajoy last month dismissed Catalonia’s government and parliament and called for new elections in the turbulent region for December 21. “We have to recover the sensible, practical, enterprising and dynamic Catalonia ... that has contributed so much to the progress of Spain and Europe,” Rajoy told members of his Popular Party in Barcelona.

Catalonia’s independence crisis has pushed more than 2 400 firms to re-register their legal headquarters outside the wealthy region.

Several hundred people rallied in Brussels yesterday to back the independence push in Catalonia, slam the EU and demand Spain release jailed regional officials. Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont, who is in self-imposed exile in Belgium, was a no-show at the demonstration that included pro-independence European Parliament members and several members of the exiled regional government.

“Democracy in Spain is not only sick, it is practically dead,” Spanish MEP Josep-Maria Terricabras, who backs Catalan independence, told the demonstrators. “It is absolutely terrible that the European institutions don’t understand that when you attack democracy, you cannot applaud Rajoy and institutions in Spain that are outside the law,” he added.

The protest, just metres from the European Union’s main institutions, came a day after hundreds of thousands of Catalans protested the jailing of regional officials for their push for independence from Spain.

In Brussels, protesters held photos of the jailed officials and signs saying “Shame on you” for the EU’s failure to support Catalonia.

The EU was “founded to not see the return dictatorship and facsim in Europe”, said the ousted Catalan minister of health Antoni Comin. As he spoke, the crowd interrupted with chants of “Libertad (freedom)” and “All not here” in reference to the jailed regional officials in Spain.