Eduardo González
The trip that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, will make at the end of this month to the United States will have an exclusively economic character and will not even include a visit to Washington DC, so that a possible meeting with President Joe Biden can be practically ruled out even though the trip is still three weeks away.
Moncloa sources said yesterday that the trip will take place between July 20 and 24 and will take place in New York, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, in California’s San Francisco Bay. The chief executive will be accompanied by a small group of Spanish companies, mainly from the digital field and startups, and will meet with private economic actors, such as large companies (a meeting with Apple has already been scheduled) and investment funds.
In these meetings, according to sources, there will be no taboo topics on the table and everything will be discussed, including the controversy generated in the United States by the so-called Google Tax. The lists of Spanish companies that will accompany Sánchez or of private actors with whom the Spanish delegation will meet have not yet been finalized, although some sources have already reported possible meetings with representatives of large companies in New York, such as Soros Fund Manager, Blackrock, Blackstone, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley or Brookfield Asset Management.
The objective of this trip will be, therefore, almost exclusively economic: to help the recovery and offer Spain as a good place to invest. For this reason, Sánchez’s presence in the United States will not have any political dimension, which means that any meeting with the country’s authorities, including President Joe Biden, can be ruled out, according to the aforementioned sources. In fact, Sánchez’s tour does not include the U.S. capital, Washington DC.
The President of the Government has not yet held any bilateral conversation, whether face-to-face, telematic or telephone, with the US President since he arrived at the White House last January. The closest thing to a meeting was the fleeting conversation between Sánchez and Biden in mid-June, during the recent NATO Summit in Brussels. The contact took place after the family photo of the allied leaders, when the Spanish Prime Minister approached the American leader to greet him. The conversation barely lasted half a minute as the two walked through the corridors of NATO.
