Eduardo González
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, today undertakes a working trip to the United States whose main objective will be to obtain the support of the large investment funds for the Recovery and Resilience Plan after COVID-19 and for which Moncloa does not foresee and has not requested any meeting with President Joe Biden.
Moncloa sources specified 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 five Spanish startups (Red Point, Rated Power, Adara Ventures, Wallbox and Carto) and will meet upon his arrival with the Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, who is in the United States this weekend to, among other things, meet with the Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo.
The Spanish delegation will leave today after the Council of Ministers, but its first day of work will begin on Wednesday, with a meeting between Sánchez and representatives of the big American investment funds JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Soros Fund Management, Goldman Sachs and Blackstone at the Spanish Trade Office in New York. Later, he will hold a working lunch with Michael Bloomberg, founder of the financial information company Bloomberg L.P. and former mayor of New York, and will meet with Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company.
On Thursday, the President of the Government will travel to Los Angeles, where he will visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a NASA unmanned spacecraft center where he will meet with several Spanish scientists, and will participate in an event at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for the promotion of the Spanish language. This event will take place more than a week after the creation of the new Instituto Cervantes Center in Los Angeles (the city with the most Hispanics in the United States) and will be attended, among others, by the Secretary General of the Institute, Luis García Montero, and Professor Barbara Fuchs, recently awarded by Cervantes with the first Ñ Prize for the international diffusion of the Spanish language. Sánchez will later be received by the Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, and will hold a meeting with major investors in the audiovisual sector, such as Netflix, Universal and others, at Universal Studios, where he will promote Spain, Audiovisual Hub of Europe, a government initiative framed in the Digital Spain 2025 agenda.
On Friday, Pedro Sánchez will travel to Silicon Valley, where he will visit the Apple Campus to meet with Tim Cook, CEO of the company. Afterwards, he will meet with HP CEO Carly Fiorina, and will hold a working lunch with executives from other major technology companies, such as Intel and Paypal. In the afternoon, he will meet with representatives of a dozen technology venture capital firms and will conclude his visit to Silicon Valley with a dinner at the headquarters of the US Chamber of Commerce in Spain (Ancham Spain) with the participation of executives from large technology companies such as Zoom and Youtube.
Therefore, the President’s visit -which includes interviews to prominent US media, such as MSNBC, Reuters, CNN and Bloomberg- will not have any political component and will be limited, above all, to economic (financial and technological) and cultural issues, as it had already been announced at the beginning of this month. Moncloa sources have insisted that no meeting with President Joe Biden is planned or has been requested, with whom the head of the Executive has not yet held any bilateral conversation, whether in person, by telematic or telephone, since the changeover in the White House last January, except for a very fleeting conversation in mid-June during the recent NATO Summit in Brussels.
