Grisi claims Santander will do “everything possible” to prevent the “tax” from continuing.
Banco Santander is ready to fight against the permanent conversion of the emergency tax, which it believes will harm the economy and credit if things go wrong. “We will do everything necessary to prevent this from happening. We are working on it,” said bank CEO Hector Grisi during the presentation of third-quarter results, when asked whether they would appear, as Bankinter reported, in fine print if its wording were challenged in court.
The banker dismissed a tax warning about the detrimental impact on credit but ruled out moving business to other geographies, as Repsol has decided to do, to protest the impact of an emergency tax borne by the energy sector that the executive is also planning to impose. constant.
“Spain is extremely important to us, we are a Spanish bank, we consider ourselves a Spanish bank and we do not have any business to do business from Spain, on the contrary, we want to continue to grow,” Grisi explained, not wanting to anticipate how the bank will respond in in case the period becomes uncertain.
“Let’s see, I think that as we say in Mexico, first we have the chicken to make the broth, and then here first we will see how the tax comes in, and from there we will take the measures that we deem appropriate in the feeling that this is how it should be,” he noted, not mentioning that the organization was “working” with its teams and lawyers “to analyze the consequences of this situation.” Grisi said the tax would hurt economic growth and banking. “It is a discriminatory tax because it mainly affects one sector. It puts us at a disadvantage compared to banks in other countries. It reduces investor confidence,” he elaborated, criticizing it as “poorly structured” because it taxes income and not benefits.
“We no longer know the structure of the new thing they are going to create, but if they operate on the same basis, it is completely wrong because it is bad for the economy. In a bad cycle, it will mostly hit us.” and we are talking about how it can generate 50 billion less loans,” he added, criticizing that “there is no other country in the world that is planning any tax on bank excess profits after 2024.”
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