Friday, March 29

Jaume Guardiola’s continuing candidacy wins the elections of the Cercle d’Economia

The Cercle d’Economia already has a new president. Jaume Guardiola has been the winner this Tuesday in the elections of the main Catalan business club against Rosa Cañadas, who presented himself with a list critical of the outgoing Board. The former CEO of Banco Sabadell, considered the continuing candidate, has obtained 630 votes, while Cañadas, who opted to be the first woman president of the entity, has gathered 243 endorsements.

Guardiola and his list will take over from the meeting that Javier Faus has chaired up to now, after the first primaries held in the history of the Cercle, which have had a participation of 71.6%.

The former banker, a member of the previous management, comes from the hand of a candidacy in which many names that have belonged to past boards also stand out. Clara Campàs (Asabys), Rita Almela (101 Ventures), Pol Morillas (Cidob), Teresa García-Milà (Barcelona GSE), Núria Cabutí (Penguin Random House Editorial Group), Carmina Ganyet (Colonial), Oriol Aspachs (CaixaBank Research) , Marc Puig (Puig) or Miguel Trías Sagnier (Cuatrecasas) are some of the best-known members of the winning list.

Rosa Cañadas, a businesswoman who chairs the Tanja Foundation and the Trea Capital Partners fund, had presented a candidacy with clear overtones critical of the previous directorate. Among other things, the candidate claimed to want to feminize and rejuvenate the entity, in addition to “recovering the voice” of the Cercle, while criticizing some of Faus’ decisions, such as having changed the venue of its annual conference, from Sitges to Barcelona .

The winner Jaume Guardiola, for his part, was a candidate supported by Faus, a very relevant characteristic in an entity that had always chosen its presidents by decision of the outgoing boards and, also, of the influential group of former presidents of the Cercle. Along these lines, Guardiola had proposed a mandate that, without breaking with the club’s traditions, would further encourage the participation of its members and issue more “courageous” opinion notes, as he explained. The winner also has a vision considered to be more Catalanist than his opponent and until now he held the economic commission of Barça, led by Joan Laporta, although he promised to leave it if he presided over the Cercle.



www.eldiario.es