The La Caixa Banking Foundation and its Investment Society, Criteria, have approved on Wednesday the return to its historic social venues of the Diagonal de Barcelona, located since October 2017 in Palma (Mallorca) due to the sovereign process.
In a statement, the Board of Trustees of La Caixa stressed that the agreement reached unanimously “is taken according to the circumstances that caused the temporary transfer of these venues to the city of Palma in 2017.”
The change of headquarters does not imply movement of people or corporate spaces or services, since most employees and work centers have always been located in Barcelona, although it has a relevant symbolic value since it is one more step in the closure of the economic turbulence stage that caused the sovereignty autumn of 2017.
In the most critical phase of the procés, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation advocated to transfer its headquarters to Palma de Mallorca in a “temporary” way to “maintain the interests and normal operation of the entity” in the situation that Catalunya then lived.
The return to Barcelona of the Financial Group leading Isidro Fainé joins the one carried out a few weeks ago by the Sabadell Bank last January and for Cementos Molins in late 2024.
“The Foundation” La Caixa “has a firm commitment to its roots, since it was founded as a pension box for old age and savings of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands in 1904 by the Barcelona lawyer Francesc Moragas, with the support of various entities of Catalan civil society,” adds the statement of the entity.
The first political reactions to the financial news have not been expected. The Government has expressed that the return of La Caixa headquarters to Catalunya is “very good news” and “one more signal of the positive impact of the normalization of the political and economic situation in Catalonia,” according to sources from the Ministry of Economy cited by the Europa Press agency.
The president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, has celebrated the return of the Foundation. “We are on the right track,” he said, in addition to linking the return with “institutional stability, rigor and legal certainty.”
On the other hand, the leader of ERC and Minister of Economics in 2017 Oriol Junqueras, in an evening reference to the transfer of the Foundation seven years ago, has affirmed that “nobody should have ever forgotten” that “the past, present and future of this financial entity is inseparable from the Catalan economic reality.”
La Caixa is the first business and financial group in Spain. Through the criteria society, directed by Ángel Simón, the entity holds relevant participations in large companies such as Naturgy, Telefónica, ACS. In addition, the Foundation is the main shareholder of Caixabank, the largest financial entity in Spain whose registered office moved to València in 2017.
On the headquarters of CaixaBank, the Bank counselor, Gonzalo Gortázar, said at the end of January, by presenting the financial results of the last year, that his presence in Valencia “has no deadlines” and has an “indefinite” character.
Criteria is the holding that manages the business heritage of the La Caixa Foundation. That is, the company has an investment portfolio in different participated companies that are nurtured by dividends. With them, either generates more investments or injecting funds to the foundation on which it depends and that are destined, in part, to their social and cultural work.
The La Caixa investment arm became last year the great buyer last year by reinforcing their participations in companies listed such as Puig, Colonial, ACS, Telefónica or Naturgy with operations that were around 5,000 million euros.
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