Garrido (CEIM) asks the Government to make "an effort" before asking citizens and businessmen for sacrifices

BPVMadrid Updated: 05/10/2022 20:31h
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“It is good that politicians tell us to leave the temperature a little lower in winter and a little higher in summer to reduce gas consumption, but we would also like it, and we believe that their message would have more force, than the Government make an effort and say that it is going to reduce the mobile fleet or that it is going to use the plane less for its displacements». Perhaps tired of the fact that from politics messages are sent to the business world about how they should act in the current context to serve the general interest, the president of the Madrid employers' association CEIM, Miguel Garrido, urged the Executive to lead by example before to demand sacrifices from citizens and businessmen.

The speech served as a prologue for the first edition of the Madrid Leaders Forum, a new business forum promoted by CEIM with the support of the Madrid City Council and the Government of the Community of Madrid, through which senior executives from some of the most important companies located in Madrid to talk about leadership, digital transformation and green transition.

Regulatory risk has hovered over a good part of the interventions. For example, that of the president and CEO of Iberia, Javier Sánchez-Prieto, who has warned about the
Risks of implementing the airline taxproposed by the Committee of Experts of the Ministry of Finance and with whose application the Government has flirted on more than one occasion.

Sánchez-Prieto recalled that while globally 55% of tourists travel by plane, in Spain that percentage exceeds 80%. "Taxes aspire to change consumption habits and in this case the effect that there may be is that people travel less," she warned. The president of Iberia has also pointed out other considerations, such as raising the tax burden on European airlines may harm their competitiveness with those of other regions. «The results of the companies are going to be damaged and, incidentally, their capacity to innovate. It is positive that we have ambitious emission reduction targets, but it is also important that we take the right steps to achieve it.”

There is also the 'Iberian exception'. The CEO of Endesa, José Bogas, answered with a laconic, "let him do it well", to the question of whether he was asking the Government for something in relation to this measure, the application of which is causing
so many headaches is causing in Spain and in Brussels. "Because there's always the fear that he won't do it right," she added.

Bogas described the initiative for which the Government in Europe has fought so hard as an "imaginative measure, not without problems." Among them, he pointed out the distortion of the signals on prices, whose effects, he said, we cannot glimpse, and also the fact that gas consumption is encouraged in a context in which it is supposed that it is trying to reduce. "It is probably necessary because it is going to lower the bill for companies and citizens, but it must be done well, for a limited time, to return to the European market as soon as possible," he warned.

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