Spain Teaches Catalonia a Lesson about the Power of Money

wolfstreet.com / by Don Quijones • Oct 6, 2017

Money is fickle and fearful.

Within 48 hours this week, Catalonia, Spain’s largest regional economy, lost three of its seven biggest homegrown multinational corporations and several large national companies — at least on paper — to cities in other regions of Spains.

The first important company to leave since Sunday’s referendum was mid-sized pharmaceutical company Oryzon Genomics SA, which announced on Wednesday that it was departing Catalonia for Madrid. The same path has been traveled recently by firms like Derby Hotels, Unico Hotels, WPP and Schibsted.

But it wasn’t until Banc Sabadell, Spain’s fifth largest bank, announced that it was changing its registered company address to Alicante, a provincial city on Spain’s south-eastern coast, that the threat of a corporate exodus from Catalonia began to be taken seriously.

Banc Sabadell is as Catalan as the town that bears its name, but its management has been warning for years that it would move out of the region in the event of Catalan independence. That threat wasn’t taken seriously until Thursday.

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