The debate on the single financing of Catalonia has become the monotheme of Spanish politics. The agreement for Salvador Illa to be invested president of the Generalitat, with the request to create an economic agreement, continues to provoke reactions… a month later, the Government saying one thing and ERC, the opposite.
Meanwhile, the other side of the coin remains hidden: the PSC leader inherits a singular expense which is summarized in: 207 public entities, with countless foundations and consortiums, many of which were created ad hoc to achieve the process; more than 374,000 civil servants and twice as many senior civil servants as the Community of Madrid.
In short, Catalonia has a gigantic administration, which supports the most public spending in Spain. Hence the demand to the State for certain measures such as the cancellation of the debt. In absolute terms, the Catalan community is the most indebted region in Spain.
At the end of the first quarter of the year, accumulated a liability of 87.3 billion euros. Of course, the ratio to GDP is even higher in the Valencian Community. But if we compare the Catalan debt to that of the Community of Madrid, the difference is clear: 31% versus 12.6%.
Among all the expenses that Catalonia has to face, a significant part comes from public entities. Among them, some are essential to ensure the coverage of basic public services, such as those related to health, education or culture.
However, there are a tangle of entities dependent on the Generalitat that consolidate an entire nationalist structure. They are known as beach bars. In the last budgets he presented Father Aragonès and which were shipwrecked due to the rejection of the Commons, the money intended to finance the various foundations, consortiums or commercial companies has increased to 4,819 million euros.
Until a few years ago, it was the CPS itself that demanded greater restraint from the Generalitat in the allocation of resources to these entities that, from the point of view of the administration, served the interests of the pro-independence parties, since their only objective was to promote the separatist process.
unconstitutional entities
Some of these entities, in fact, were annulled at the time by the Constitutional Court, although the Government has maintained them and has not only increased its investments in them. For example, the Catalan Tax Agency, created to assume the management of all taxes and abolished in 2015 by the Guarantee Body, would have received nearly 103 million euros with the latest public accounts.
Another organization that was included in the budgets and that was declared null and void by the TC is the Metrological Service of Catalonia, whose cost exceeds 10 million. In the same way, the Treasury continues to increase the famous Diplocat, the consortium for the international projection of Catalonia, with more than 2 million.
In the past, it was the instrument used by the Mas and Puigdemont governments to sell the process abroad. Between 2011 and 2017, he received more than 417 million euros which were used, among other things, to entertain journalists in Switzerland to convince them of the benefits of his political cause.
For years, the constitutionalist parties and associations of Catalonia have denounced that the Generalitat, first with CiU at its head, then with Junts and finally with ERC, has dedicated itself to weaving a whole clientelist network to privilege the pro-independence parish. with jobs, public contracts and rigged contracts for family and friends.
Catalan society is not aware of the information I am giving here: “termites” in the Generalitat. pic.twitter.com/CGIhbyJSeC
– Alejandro Fernández (@alejandroTGN) March 13, 2024
An example of this is the grief that weighs on one of the main leaders of Junts, the former president of the Parliament, Laura Borras: four and a half years in prison and 13 years of ban from all public office for the offences of falsification of documents and embezzlement while she was director of the Catalan literature institution.
The High Court of Catalonia proved that Borràs had awarded up to 18 minor contracts to a personal friend.
Beyond the calls beach barsCatalonia continues to increase its presence abroad through the famous embassies. For “deploy the network of 21 delegations of the Generalitat in 72 countries”the latest budgets of Aragonès provided 102 million euros for the position of Foreign action.
If one of the crusades supported by Spanish associations in Catalonia is linguistic immersion in Catalan… in the aforementioned accounts of the current year, the government has increased spending on the promotion of the co-official language: from 59 to 63 million. In the same way, public defenders are currently rewarded with a bonus of 25 euros for each document presented in Catalan.
To cover this entire network, Catalonia has the largest number of public agents: 374,442. Of these, a total of 290,196 depend directly on the Generalitat. That is: almost 8 out of 100 employees in the region. A workforce that has continued to grow in recent years, with a 23% increase since 2010, when the financial crisis broke out.
On the political level, another fact is no less important: the Catalan leaders are, by far, those who earn the most in Spain. The president’s salary, for example, is 136,177 euros per year. That of the President of the Government, 90,010.20 euros per year. Similarly, regional councillors are significantly better paid than in the rest of the regions: 120,773.
On the other hand, the number of senior officials in charge of the Generalitat and the Parliament stands at 368. This is more than double that of the Community of Madrid.
