The Bank of Spain published, on November 20, 2019, an informative note on financial aid in the restructuring process of the Spanish financial system (2009-2018). The total real aid to banks amounted to sixty-five thousand seven hundred and twenty-five million euros (€65,725 million).
The public cost of the so-called bank bailout in 2018 amounted to forty-two thousand five hundred and sixty-one million euros (€42,561 million). This is the figure for the cost to public coffers of the bank bailout, deducting the amounts recovered and those "estimated to be recovered."
It is what we all pay for the pampered businesses derived from financial speculation, trading, suicidal investments, extraction transactions, transnational usurers, the real estate bubble, bank scams, corruption endorsed by international treaties, corruption that ended at shotgun range on an estate in Córdoba. We all pay for the party, but a few enjoyed it.
Sixty-five thousand seven hundred and twenty-five million euros subtracted from health, education, justice, research.
Between 2008 and 2010, the European Union demanded the return of more than thirty million euros (€30.6 million) of European funds for regional economic incentives invested in illegal hotels on the island of Lanzarote. The state returned that amount under penalty of a fine and demanded the return to the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands. It was never known if that money that was taken from all of us was claimed from each of the businessmen who used that public money illegally for their private business.
We all pay for the hangover of the fraud of a few. The fraudulent use of European funds for illegal constructions had been discussed on many occasions within the Canary Islands Parliament without anyone doing anything other than pretending until the return of the money was demanded by Europe.
Since 1994 (Law 19/1994), the Government of the Canary Islands has allowed businessmen on the islands to keep up to 90% of the taxes they must pay to the treasury, to everyone, to reinvest in their companies. Initially, the purpose of the RIC was to create employment, reinvest in the industries of the Canary Islands, generate wealth, invest in research and development, in the environment...
The perversion of the system is such that in 2019 a group of Canary Islands businessmen have launched a venture capital company that seeks to materialize that money "legally evaded from the public treasury." Among the projects in which this money subtracted from the public treasury is going to be invested is the renovation of a hotel in Puerto Rico (Mogán), where everyone knows that there is a shortage of beds.
The Canary Islands has the lowest corporate tax in Europe, and tax incentives benefit large multinationals. The figures reveal that business savings (Canary Islands Special Zone) are sufficient to cover salary costs, but this does not prevent this community, together with Andalusia, from historically suffering the highest unemployment levels in the country, not to mention precariousness and the black labor market.
Last April 3, we celebrated the World Day for the Abolition of Tax Havens. It is impossible to properly celebrate that day without remembering that up to 41 hotels and marinas in the Canary Islands were revealed to be linked to tax havens. The large Spanish hotel families took their money out of the country to deposit it in opaque accounts in Switzerland or Panama. The personal fortunes amassed, after years of exploiting the territory and decapitalizing their companies, are directed to tax havens in order to evade taxes in the country of which they claim to be citizens.
These days, the number of Canary Islands companies that are taking advantage of the path drawn by the Government to alleviate the effects of confinement due to Covid-19 is made public. The companies that have taken advantage of the virus to dismiss their workers with impunity are also made public. The conclusion is that the state assumes the business cost of the Covid-19 crisis. Observing the deficiencies of public services, job insecurity, poverty rates, the ruin of small and medium-sized companies, the disappearance of the middle class, the abuse of the self-employed, and putting all this in contrast with the government advertising campaign, central, autonomous and local, to which they drag us daily, I feel more and more every day that we are, again, in full business rescue.
The government's economic measures are aimed at the big businessman, the fraudster, the financier, the scammer, the one who has been stealing his business profits from the public treasury for years with the permission and acquiescence of the rulers. I am referring to those large companies that exploited the tourism monoculture, accumulating the money from the profits that they should have paid to the public treasury, while the Canary Islands community led the unemployment and job insecurity rates. Those same ones that have a direct line with the political parties, since they are their financiers, and ask them for subsidies, aid, tax exemptions, public promotions so that the circle of money closes on themselves. Those stingy companies that hire half-day work for a day and a half, that pay in black for the real time contracted, that use intermediary employment companies to skimp 5% of the salary to their workers, that produce nothing more than Kellys and slaves.
Companies that for years have obtained huge profits at the cost of exploiting public resources, companies that have converted the use of our beaches, our roads, our health services into private property, companies that the Canary Islands government has allowed to keep the tax money to "reinvest" in places like Tarfaya, Latvia or Cape Verde. Decapitalized companies, as they have converted business profits into personal fortunes, companies that finance political parties in the government, companies that exploited the tourism monoculture until it died on its own.
Where is what was earned in ten years of occupancy rates approaching 100%? Where is the tax money that they have not paid to the public treasury? Where is the investment in work, in the environment, in research and development that the Canary Islands Investment Reserve required of them?
Curiously, the businessmen directly benefited by this government bailout are the ones who advocate for wild liberalism and uncontrolled capitalism. Those same ones who clamor for the slimming of the state, the elimination of supervisory interference, the impoverishment of the welfare state. Those businessmen who call themselves patriots, proudly displaying Canary Islands or Spanish flags with patriotic pride. Those who invest the money stolen from the public treasury in private schools, in private hospitals, those who appoint and remove health ministers, mayors or presidents.
Those same businessmen who have promoted the global village to relocate their companies from Spain and locate them in China to save "labor costs", have hidden their money in tax havens to avoid paying taxes in Spain and have decapitalized their companies to show off fortunes and buy lives, and now boast of charity donating material to a health system diminished by the cost of the bank bailout. Charity as a social policy that the powerful like so much.
I read today, Sunday, April 12, that the president of the government of the Canary Islands, a clever socialist if ever there was one, asks Sánchez to extend the ERTEs to tourism companies. He would be better off investing in how to eat bricks, which will be more useful to us while the rescue of human beings arrives.
I'm going to laugh when they deign to give content to the bombastic declaration of climate emergency. We are not witnessing the spectacle of governmental blindness, it is the conscious and deliberate complicity of the ruler with the corrupter.