MADRID, 13 Abr. (EUROPA PRESS) –
An absolute majority of Ferrovial shareholders who have cast their vote at the company’s shareholders’ meeting have supported the company’s plan to move its headquarters to the Netherlands, voting in favor of the proposal.
With a quorum of 77.6%, the board has given the ‘green light’ to the operation by which the Spanish parent company will merge with its Dutch subsidiary, the result of which will create a new firm based in that country and which will mean that the multinational stop being Spanish.
In any case, the door is still open for a part of the percentage that has voted against, yet to be known, to exercise their right of separation, that is, to sell their shares to the company due to their opposition to the execution of this transfer.
If only 2.56% of the shareholders exercise it within a month from this Thursday, the operation will not go ahead, since the consideration to be paid by Ferrovial will exceed the limit of 500 million that it set in the terms of the operation.
If no one exercises that right, or at least that percentage is not reached, this will close a period of more than a month and a half of tensions between the Spanish Government and the company, after the former conveyed its disagreement with the operation and the second defended the right to undertake a cross-border merger, in this case with a European country.
The only fringe open now will be the fiscal cost of this operation, that is, the taxes to be paid for the transfer. The Government has already warned the company that if the Tax Agency does not find economic (but fiscal) reasons to carry out the operation, it will not be exempt from the tax advantages that apply in these cases.
On the contrary, the president of the company, Rafael del Pino, has defended in his speech at the meeting that the operation may benefit from the tax neutrality regime, as it has economic and non-fiscal reasons.
Ferrovial’s main shareholder is its president, Rafael del Pino, who controls 20.4% of the capital, followed by his sister María del Pino (8.2%); the British TCI fund (6.4%), founded by Christopher Hohn, a British billionaire who appears in position 273 on the Forbes list of the world’s greatest fortunes; his other brother Leopoldo del Pino (4.1%) and the funds BlackRock (3.18%) and Lazard (3%).
