What started as a golden dream for economic recovery after the pandemic, with announcements of billionaire investments that would make Spain the center of electromobility in southern Europe, is turning into a bureaucratic nightmare for all concerned. The Volkswagen group, by far the manufacturer that has presented the most ambitious project related to the granting of national aid, realized by European funds
Next Generation EUlast Thursday threatened to cancel the battery gigafactory project in Sagunto (Valencia), which would involve an investment of 3,000 million euros and
would immediately employ 3,000 people.
This factory is included in its strategy
Fast forward the future (F3), in which Seat also participates, which happens to make Spain the production center for small electric cars, with factories in Barcelona and Navarra. In total they had planned 10,000 million and to start assembling the cars in the middle of the decade, at which time Sagunto would be operational.
Volkswagen’s investment is said to represent the largest sum in Spain’s industrial history and has been a medal of the Ministry of Industry since its official announcement. However, the ultimatum came in the week in which the Perte Evaluation Committee would finally approve the initiatives.
The Perte VEC is endowed with 2,975 million eurosof which 1,425 loans at 0% interest and 10 years, while the remaining 1,550 will be grants.
A preliminary resolution of the 13 projects that accepted the call was published in August. Of these, 10 were approved, with a total of 702.7 million euros, 23% of the total. Shortly afterwards, Ford announced it had been kept out of the call because it could not make its investments before June 30, 2025, the time limit for using the funds.
For example, the three largest beneficiaries of the preliminary figures for August were the Volkswagen group, with 167.3 million; Mercedes-Benz, with 159.3 million and the Nissan Barcelona reindustrialization hub, led by QEV Technologies, with 105.1 million. Taking into account that the former CEO of the Volkswagen Group,
Herbert Diesshad asked the government for one billion to encourage its investment, receiving one-tenth outside the originally planned deadlines has not been seen well from Germany, and the company hopes to be able to reach some 300 or 400 million in the final resolution. to calculate.
The industry already knows how much each project will receive. At the presentation of the Perte Naval in Vigo last Friday, the holder of the wallet,
Kings Maroto, stated that the first call from the Perte would have VEC 877 million, 175 more than originally planned in the preliminary resolution, reports Natalia Sequeiro of Santigao. Their distribution will be communicated to each beneficiary group from next week, after which they will have to submit the corresponding guarantees and they are expected to receive 90% of the total aid before the end of the year.
This amount represents 30% of the 2,975 million However, with which the mechanism has worked, Maroto was reassuring: “The rest of the money will go into a second line of Perte, which may even be provided with more resources.” This new call will open when the first one ends, expected in the first quarter of 2023.
This would allow projects that do not meet the formal or temporary requirements of the bases published in May 2022 to access the funds. Examples are Ford Almusafes, the Envision battery factory in Navalmoral de la Mata (Cáceres) or a confidential Stellantis project that other European countries are also opting for and that would guarantee the future of the Vigo factory for the next 10 years. “We can’t talk about it yet, but we are strengthening the incentives to arrive in Spain and where autonomy increases we will be able to use more resources and be more competitive,” said Maroto, who criticized the Xunta de Galicia for it. limit themselves to blaming the national government and demanded that “they go from words to deeds and propose what support they will give to the Stellantis project.”
The Franco-Italian-American manufacturer, the third largest in the world by production volume, confirmed last Friday the 14th that it would modernize one of the assembly lines at its plant in Figueruelas (Zaragoza) to receive a new electric model, predictably the new Lancia Ypsilon or the Peugeot 208. This is a consequence of taking advantage of the Perte, from which the Galician factory will receive only 15 million.
Other focal points for the government’s auto industry to date include the Moves III plan, which has mobilized €626 million; the Moves Singulares (364 million); the technology program for sustainable mobility (40 million), Moves Fleets (50 million) or the implementation of AI in the value chain (45 million). Between everyone and Perte they are over 2,000 million
Source: La Verdad
I am Ida Scott, a journalist and content author with a passion for uncovering the truth. I have been writing professionally for Today Times Live since 2020 and specialize in political news. My career began when I was just 17; I had already developed a knack for research and an eye for detail which made me stand out from my peers.
