It’s not a surprise, Mariano Rajoy’s “People’s Party” is pretty much a direct descendant of Franco’s Fascist (Falange) party, and the Falange was dedicated to grinding everything Catalan into dust:<\/p>\n
Just over a year has passed since over two million people in Catalonia voted in a banned referendum to leave Spain. On that day, the separatists were given a brutal lesson in the raw power of state violence. Days later, they were given another harsh lesson, this time in the fickleness of money. Within days of holding the vote, which was brutally suppressed but not prevented by Spanish police, Spain\u2019s north eastern region was forced to watch as one after another of its brand names moved their headquarters, at least on paper, to other parts of Spain.<\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>But what is only now becoming clear is just how central a role the Spanish government in Madrid was playing in fomenting this massive exodus of funds. The Catalan newspaper Ara<\/i> has revealed that large state-owned companies such as public broadcaster RTVE, rail infrastructure manager Adif, freight and passenger train operator RENFE and Spanish ports, on the behest of Spain\u2019s central government, raided their own accounts in Catalonia during the frenzied days immediately after the referendum.<\/span>
<\/span>In one day alone, the state-owned companies withdrew \u20ac2 billion from Banco Sabadell. The presidents of these state-owned companies apparently told the bank\u2019s CEO, Jaume Guardiola, that they had received orders to trigger a run on deposits. As much as a third of all the money that left Catalonia during those first days of October belonged to institutions or companies controlled by the State.<\/span>
<\/span>The covert ploy worked like a charm. In the short space of just a few days Banco Sabadell suffered a deposit outflow of \u20ac12 billion, while Caixabank lost almost double that, according to Ara<\/i>.<\/span>
<\/span>Another senior executive at Banco Sabadell allegedly asked Spain\u2019s then-Economy Minister Luis de Guindos about the apparent cause of the bank run, to which he received the response: \u201cHave you changed your company address yet?\u201d When the executive answered in the affirmative, the minister said there was no longer any reason to worry. Within hours, the deposits of the state-owned firms were back in their accounts.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn the long run, Rajoy ended up worsening the divisions between Barcelona and Madrid, with the spectacle of police officers in body armor beating up elderly ladies.<\/p>\n
The smart move would have been to allow the independence forces to fall into a morass of back-biting and corruption, but the dynamics of the People’s Party were such that they had to respond with brutality.
He really had no <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the narratives regarding the conflict between Madrid and Barcelona over Catalan independence and autonomy is that the independence movement chased away finance and created a capital flight. It turns out that the Rajoy government aggressively pushed the companies to leave Catalonia. It’s not a surprise, Mariano Rajoy’s “People’s Party” is pretty much a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,392,630,437],"class_list":["post-178624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-economy","tag-european-union","tag-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178624"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}