Fernando González Urbaneja | If the case of the trains that don’t fit through the tunnels was a grotesque case typical of a country of breakdowns, Barça’s payments to a professional referee with a federative position confirms the hypothesis of breakdown. For almost two decades, throughout this century, the leading Catalan sports club, more than a club, has spent more than seven million euros in unexplained and perhaps inexplicable payments…
Getting an appointment to deal with pperwork at the Madrid offices of the National Social Security Institute is mission impossible. There are citizens who have taken up to four months to get an appointment after spending day after day in front of the computer, as nobody answers the phone. The central government is looking for ways to solve this problem, while the CSIF trade union demands an urgent meeting and…
The Bank of Spain estimates that the government will allocate between €34,000 and €40,000 million in measures to deal with the energy and inflation crises arising from the war in Ukraine between 2021 and 2025 and, of this total, only between 15% and 20% has been targeted at the most vulnerable incomes, meaning that between 80% and 85% is of a generalised nature. The largest impact would be concentrated in…
F.R. | The plenary session of the Senate is scheduled to debate and vote on the draft Securities Markets and Investment Services Act by urgent procedure. It is expected that the new regulation will be approved without major changes to the text published last September in the Official Gazette of the Spanish Parliament (BOCG). According to the sources consulted, the bill could return to Congress for examination and approval of…
The delegation of MEPs will return from Madrid to Brussels on Wednesday with the feeling of having failed to get “answers” to the main questions that caused their “serious doubts” about Spain’s management of the NextGenerationEU recovery funds. The government has boasted of co-governance, but the Autonomous Communities do not ratify it,” explains an internal source within the mission. “We asked Nadia Calviño and José Luis Escrivá about the reduction…
The president of Renfe, Isaías Táboas, and the Secretary of State for Transport, Isabel Pardo de Vera (former president of ADIF, the company that owns the railway network) have left their posts yesterday, after the major scandal that Renfe, to cover the service of the Spanish north coast, had ordered 31 trains with such dimensions that they did not fit through the tunnels of the route: https://bit.ly/3YSJvIj The fact was…
Francisco Vidal | Covid, inflation and the new minimum wage hike are just additional problems for SMEs that suffer “a regulatory burden that suffocates them: a commercial establishment opening its doors in 2021 in any Spanish city would be affected by more than 3,000 regulations, from European to municipal”. SMEs make up the heart of Spain’s productive fabric and, in fact, by the end of 2022 there were 2.9 million…
J.P. Marín-Arrese | It is not surprising that on the eve of elections, government coalitions should be breaking up, with each partner distancing itself from its former allies in an attempt to improve its election results. What is surprising in our country is the deliberate intention of publicly banging each other’s heads together while at the same time pretending not to get out of the official car. It is understandable…
The Animal Welfare Law promoted by Minister Ione Belarra and approved in Congress with the votes of PSOE, Podemos, ERC and Bildu has introduced an important change in the Spanish Penal Code by changing the term ‘domestic animal’ to ‘vertebrate animal’. A vertebrate animal is any animal that has bones and an articulated skeleton or backbone. Now, under the new law, striking, injuring or killing a vertebrate animal will be…
Fernando González Urbaneja | The case of the trains that do not fit in the tunnels is a significant anecdote both of a huge, astonishing error in design and commissioning, and of the absence of explanations and a coherent account of what happened. What we do know is confusing and the laments of the regional presidents affected are insufficient to understand the case. The comments from the ministry and ADIF…