The assemblies held in Vitoria-Gasteiz and Bilbao have taken a decisive step in the privatization of the public bank Kutxabank, which emerged from the merger of the savings banks of the Basque Autonomous Community: so far the boards that have been the main centres of power of the Caja Vital alavesa and the BBK of Bizkaia have given their approval to their proposal for transformation into foundation.

The Gipuzkoan Fund, the third leg of Kutxabank, took over this decision until the autumn of this year. The privatization broke the line of the public bank that since the creation of the Municipal Savings Fund of Vitoria-Gasteiz in 1850 has been gestating in Hego Euskal Herria – the traumatic collapse of the Navarre Fund took place earlier.

The transformation of savings banks into private banks has sparked a great deal of controversy. The previous processes of concentration were more reassuring, first to unify the two that each territory had and then to integrate the CAV into one. This happened in 2011. But in addition to the need to better organise the banking business, the 2008 financial crisis has conditioned the steps taken in recent years. In addition to the outbreak of the credit business of the United States and Europe, the Spanish State evidenced the effects of the bubble that fed the banks, and in these cases the public savings banks. Although the situation of the Basque banks was not as catastrophic as that of many others in Spain, there was a need to pay the bets made by those here; investments in real estate speculation and the purchase of the defeated Caja Sur Andaluza Caja Sur, have today unbalanced the foundations of what is Kutxabank. In this very difficult situation, orders have come from Europe to privatise all public services, including banking.

The path of privatisation is no longer reversed. In the assemblies made up of clients of the banks, workers and promoters – representatives of the local administrations – political parties with an absolute majority in the institutions, the PNV, the PSE and the PP, there have been no outbreaks. To defend the step taken, they argue that the need to privatize Kutxabank, which brings together more than half of the savings of Basque citizenship, has been dictated by Brussels and that the new law regulating the box sector in Spain leaves no other way out. On the contrary, those who oppose this - basically the coalition EH Bildu, the Basque unions ELA and LAB and some popular movements, supported by intellectuals working in the defense of public finances - believe that the new law still gives opportunities to maintain the public character of the boxes and denounce that it is the same parties that say that privatization is necessary those who have negotiated the law in Madrid.

The well-known banker and former politician Mario Fernández Pelaz, president of Kutxabank, already announced in February this year that 70% of bank capital would go to private capital. Since then, there has been a proliferation of those who denounce that this operation is “cooked” between two protagonists: on the one hand, the political establishment, represented in the CAPV by the PNV and the PP in Spain, called to collaborate with the PSE; on the other hand, the financial oligarchy of Bizkaia, also called “Gente de Neguri”, led by Argentinian Mario Bilbao himself.

Meanwhile, the banks of Álava, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa have seen how since their creation the ability to do good and social work was reduced which was their main objective, selling the real estate protected by the generosity of local administrations in the history of more than a century to the foreign speculative funds, reducing the network of offices and workers spread out in the banking towns... From now on, the Government of Spain will be the principal employer of Kutxabank and not the Basque Parliament. The Ekai Group, which has made a strong criticism of privatization, has described this operation as a "coup d'état".

This is the end of the adventure of the managers established by the main political forces of the CAV, who want to continue to govern the restored bank, extending to Spain in the last decades and immersing themselves in the speculative operations of the same. The CAV has lost its most important financial instrument… and soon we will see the effect it has always had on the economic concert that the CAV has proudly shown as a characteristic of its autonomy.