In Barcelona, before the watchful eye of the Catalan business, the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced yesterday that he was going to launch a public consultation to collect the opinions of civil society about BBVA’s OPA to Banco Sabadell. This afternoon, the Ministry of Economy It has enabled a form on its website to be able to pronounce on the operation and help the Executive to intervene the offer of the Basque bank.
The launch is made by the department led by Carlos Corps since this is responsible for deciding, with a deadline of May 27, if it raises the case to the Council of Ministers to intervene in the OPA. The way it has to intervene is to harden, soften or maintain the commitments set by the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC).
The Executive seeks with this unpublished public consultation to arm arguments and support against an operation that has always rejected, and based on criteria of “general interest” since they cannot use competition, as required by law. But the birth of this consultation was born twisted from the beginning since it is a technical fudge.
What Economics has launched is a Microsoft Forms form with up to ten points to fill. Every citizen who wants, company, association and organization is allowed to participate. The questionnaire does require three elements to be able to count as a valid answer: name/corporate name, DNI/CIF and email. Without those three stuffed fields, you can’t advance.
Everything is done in the same questionnaire, manually writing all fields. You can also indicate the organization to which it belongs. The most serious problem is that the identification that is requested has no guarantee that it is real. This newspaper has proven that a false name can be written (Elvis Presley can participate), a false ID and a false email; You can also write anything meaningless and the filter passes.
Once this is filled, the user meets the main question: “Do you consider that there are criteria of general interest different from the defense of competition that can be affected by operation BBVA/Banco Sabadell?” It is answered with a ‘yes or a’ no ‘.
After answering this question, five others open that allow the Government What are the criteria of general interest at risk, the impact of damage to the general interest and with what measures could be avoided. Quite general issues that give rise to the user to expand and give the arguments you want.
The problem is that The same user can vote thousands of times and give different answers in each of them, as this newspaper has proven. And you can even send additional information directly to an email. The initial control of the ministry, thus, is void.
And that same user who trains the form can do so Thousands of times both with your name and with different names each time. The possibilities are endless as the Ministry of Economy has designed this questionnaire that absolutely verifies anything, at first, about the identity of the participants or their answers.
At no time does the public consultation require the user to use any of the multiple identification systems that public administrations allow at this time. Neither key, nor digital certificate, nor anything. No initial control over who participates or how.
The public consultation will be open during seven business daysuntil May 16. The date is important since Minister Carlos Corps will have until May 27 to decide to raise the case to the Council of Ministers and intervene. And the executive will have a lot of work ahead if he wants to get some valid data from this consultation, since everything can be falsified at the time of sending the answer.
Purify the data
Sources from the Ministry of Economy argue that they will purify all these anomalies in the subsequent analysis of the data. They will purify the fact that a person can vote several timesto do it in different ways, that false data can be put … everything, according to economy.
The identification data of the users who participate and that are true will be checked; The participants’ DNI will be checked, a posteriori. Likewise, the Ministry says that false responses will be eliminated and that if there are repeated responses they will also be eliminated. Everything will be done afterwards.
The explanation given by the department of Carlos body It is that the purification process that will be done is the one that is usually done in public consultations when some legislation is going to be released. The differences in this case are several.
In the public consultations of the different ministries there are varied formats to present the contributions: via form, via email … but in no case through a Microsoft Forms document without any initial control.
There is also the big difference that the responses of this consultation cannot condition legislation, but an operation of the private sector. And the Government intends to use the answers to listen to the opinions of all kinds of actors of society to help, thus intervene in the OPA. A BBVA OPA on a Sabadell bank that today has a stock market value of more than 13.6 billion euros.
