SEPI Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales

• Elimination of a total of 80 managerial positions and 450 positions of Director in the state-owned enterprises and in other entities of the corporate public.
• An in-depth review of the state-owned corporate groups, which will result in the disappearance, through mergers or liquidations, of 29 state-owned enterprises.

The Council of Ministers has approved the Plan for the Reorganization of the State-Owned Corporate Sector, which envisages a significant reduction in the number of the State companies and managerial positions, with the aim of increasing the operating efficiency of the State corporate sector.

In this way, the commitment assumed by the Council of Ministers on January 29th is met, within the framework of the passing of the Immediate Action Plan 2010 and the Austerity Plan for the Administration for the period 2011-2013, with the goal of approving by the deadline of April 30th a plan for the reorganization of the structures of the Administration and of the state-owned corporate sector.

Reduction in the number of state-owned companies

In line with the commitments taken by the Government and with the austerity measures already in place within the Administration, the Plan which has been approved today entails the elimination and reincorporation of enterprises, as well as the reorganization of the governing bodies of 106 companies of the state-owned corporate sector in which the State has a majority shareholding and can, as a result, directly apply those decisions.

Regarding the measures which have to do with the structure of the corporate groups, the Government has launched a deep reorganization process which will result in the merger of 24 state-owned companies, which will end up being 9. Within the area of Grupo Patrimonio, these actions are focused on the Water Companies, since of the 10 currently in operation, 8 will be merged into 3; in the Agrarian Infrastructure companies, which will be reduced to 1, from the current 4; and in the Cultural Companies, as the 3 currently in existence will be merged into just 1. Besides, within this group, DDI (Sociedad Estatal para el Desarrollo del Diseño y la Innovación) will be merged into ENISA (Empresa Nacional de Innovación). In the group of companies of the Ministry of Public Works (Fomento), 2 companies will be merged into 1, and within the Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (SEPI), the concentration process will involve 2 Tragsa affiliated companies, which will be merged, and to the companies Infoinvest, S.A., Sepides and Ingruinsa, which will become 1 new company.

On the other hand, the Government has taken all the company decisions required for putting into effect the total liquidation of 14 state-owned mercantile companies. All the above measures entail the disappearance of 29 state-owned enterprises, which amounts to a 27.4% reduction in the number of companies in which the State has a majority shareholding.

Less manager positions

The other great action axis of the Plan will be the reduction in the number of manager positions which exist in the organizational charts of the state-owned enterprises. The Plan approved today requires a reduction of at least 10% in the number of manager positions in state-owned enterprises, as well as a reduction of at least 15% in the number of the positions in the Board of Directors of those state-owned enterprises which have a Board of Directors made up by a minimum of 6 Directors.

These measures will entail the elimination of 150 Directors' positions, which must be formalized by July 31st, and the reduction of 36 managerial positions, which must come into force by December 31st, 2010.The same reduction in the number of Managers and Director applied to state-owned enterprises will extend also, with the same deadlines, to other state-owned corporate entities. In the case of the Boards of the port authorities, the number of Directors will be reduced by 40%. With these reductions, a total of 300 Directors and 40 managerial positions will disappear.

The Government, through the Delegated Commission for Financial Issues, will carry out a permanent follow-up of the Plan's implementation, and will submit a Report about it to the Council of Ministers during the first quarter of 2011.