Beginning of disbandment

Except for autocracies and the undocumented, it is never good news when large companies leave a country in search of territories where they can develop their activities. The flight from Spain of Ferrovial, one of the first and most important multinationals based in our country, is very bad news to say the least, as it sends an unmistakable signal that Spain does not have the right circumstances to work and therefore lead the most advanced projects for the country's progress.  

The company has justified its decision on the grounds that it is an international firm and that 90% of its stock market value is in foreign hands, in addition to the fact that 82% of its business is carried out outside Spain. This is an elegant way of not alluding to the reason that clearly underlies the decision: the legal insecurity that is becoming increasingly evident in Spain, the fiscal harassment to which individuals and companies are subjected with features bordering on the confiscatory, and the manifest hostility of the social-communist government, which increasingly viciously points to them as the culprits of the brutal deterioration of the ills that beset the Spanish economy, once the mantra of the pandemic and Putin's war are no longer sufficient to justify the worst Spanish indices with respect to those of their European Union counterparts.

Ferrovial, which was founded in 1952 in a small flat by Rafael del Pino Moreno, and which in its first seventy years of life has a stock market value of 20 billion euros, is the first of the large companies based in Spain to decide to change its registered office to the Netherlands, i.e. within the European Union itself. Its declared intention to continue trading in Madrid and to do so in the United States could also have been done from what until now has been its headquarters, a tangible demonstration that Amsterdam offers its directors a friendlier environment than the one it breathes in Spain.  

"Mutatis mutandis, what Ferrovial is doing now is what the more than 6,000 companies that decided to leave Catalonia for other parts of Spain, where they would not be subjected to hostile signalling, already did, and however much governments try to blur this reality, the truth is that very few of the companies that have decided to leave have already done so, the truth is that very few of those who left as a result of the madness of the "procés" have even considered returning to a region whose leaders stand up and ignore the head of state and impose a Gestapo to persecute those who express themselves in the official language of Spain.

However much Ferrovial may want to disguise emigration to other places, the message is that Spain is increasingly less suitable for developing free enterprise, or that in the least bad case it is far behind other environments. If such an impression were to become widespread, it could lead to an outflow, from whose dark legend it would take a long time for the country to recover.

Naturally, in countries where autocracies or simply totalitarian regimes have prevailed, free enterprise gets in the way. This is the very essence of Latin American Castro-Chavism, where, in the end, neither the many millions of citizens who have to go into exile, harassed by misery and lack of freedom, nor the ruin of entrepreneurs, whose audacity and courage in the face of risks gave rise to a thriving middle class, matter. Nor does it matter that investors are fleeing, or that they are tempted to take their clothes off their backs before entering a country that has little respect for legal certainty. Generally, in such regimes, the only thing that really matters is to literally "squat" in power and become the lord and master of lives and property, in other words, the deliverer of whatever there is.

There is already too much empirical experience showing that the extreme left does not believe in freedom, let alone in work and effort for wealth creation. Moreover, those who dare to stand out for it, even if in that venture they create millions of jobs, are suspected and subject to persecution and harassment. The case of the invectives, insults and attacks that businessmen such as Amancio Ortega and Juan Roig receive in Spain from the extreme left is the best example of the horizon that the ministers of half of the Spanish government advocate for this country.

The bad news of Ferrovial's departure follows the inspection carried out in Madrid by the European Parliament's Commission in charge of auditing the use of funds earmarked for modernising the Spanish economy. According to their initial conclusions, the report they will draw up does not seem likely to dispel the very serious doubts about the final destination of these funds. Too many warning signs for a country that even aspired to occupy a large part of the space left by the UK's Brexit.