What began 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 those involved. The Volkswagen Group, by far the constructor that has presented the most ambitious project linked to the granting of national aid, which is articulated by European funds Next Generation EUthreatened last Thursday to cancel the battery gigafactory project in Sagunto (Valencia), which would involve an investment of 3,000 million and would directly employ 3,000 people.
This factory is included within its strategy Future Fast Forward (F3), in which Seat also participates, which happens to make Spain its production center for small electric cars, with plants in Barcelona and Navarra. In total, they had planned 10,000 million and to start assembling the cars from the middle of the decade, at which time Sagunto would be operational.
Volkswagen’s investment would represent the largest amount in the industrial history of Spain and has been a medal from the Ministry of Industry since the official announcement was made. However, the ultimatum occurred in the week in which the Perte Evaluation Commission would give the final approval to the initiatives.
interim resolution
The Perte VEC is endowed with 2,975 million eurosof which 1,425 will be loans at 0% interest and 10 years, while the remaining 1,550 will be grants.
In August, a provisional resolution of the 13 projects that accepted the call was published. Of these, 10 were approved, with a total of 702.7 million euros, 23% of the total. Shortly after, Ford announced that it was left out of the call as it could not undertake its investments before June 30, 2025, the time limit for using the funds.
Thus, the three largest beneficiaries of the tentative numbers 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. Bearing in mind that the former CEO of the Volkswagen Group, Herbert Diesshad asked the Government for one billion to encourage its investment, receiving a tenth outside the originally planned deadlines has not been well seen from Germany and the company hopes to be able to count on some 300 or 400 million in the final resolution.
To distribute 877 million
Industry already knows how much each project will receive. In the presentation of the Perte Naval in Vigo last Friday, the holder of the portfolio, Kings Maroto, stated that the first call of the Perte VEC would have 877 million, 175 more than originally planned in the provisional resolution, reports Natalia Sequeiro from Santigao. The distribution of these will be notified from next week to each beneficiary group, at which time they will have to present the corresponding guarantees and it is expected that they will receive 90% of the total aid in advance before the end of the year.
This amount represents 30% of the 2,975 million with which the mechanism has, however, Maroto was reassuring: “The rest of the money will be poured into a second line of Perte, which may even be provided with more resources.” This new call will be opened when the first one has finished, foreseeably during the first quarter of 2023.
This would allow projects that did not meet the requirements, whether formal or temporary, of the bases published in May 2022 to have access to 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 plant for the next 10 years. “We cannot talk about it yet, but we are reinforcing the incentives for it to arrive in Spain and where the autonomies add up, we will be able to leverage more resources and be more competitive,” said Maroto, who criticized the Xunta de Galicia for limiting itself to reproaching the National Government and demanded that “they move from words to deeds and propose what support they will give to the Stellantis project.”
The French-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, of which the Galician factory will only receive 15 million.
Other lines of support for the Government’s automotive industry to date are the Moves III Plan, which has mobilized 626 million; the Moves Singulares (364 million); the technological 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 exceed 2,000 million