The Diplomat
The Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE) and its Colombian equivalent, the National Association of Industrialists (ANDI), constituted this past week the Spain-Colombia Business Council, a new tool to support companies from both countries that will operate in coordination with Embassies, trade offices, ICEX-Invest in Spain and ProColombia.
The act of constitution took place last Tuesday in Bogota during a business meeting attended by the vice president of CEOE and president of the Institute of Economic Studies-IEE, Íñigo Fernández de Mesa; the president of ANDI, Bruce Mac Master; the general director of CEOE International and permanent secretary of CEIB, Narciso Casado; and the president of the board of directors of Sanitas, Sylvia Escovar.
During the meeting, organized by CEOE and ANDI with the support of the Spanish Economic and Commercial Office in Colombia and attended by businessmen from both countries, an agreement was signed for the creation of the Spain-Colombia Business Council, “which represents a private cooperation tool that contributes to the development of business, bilateral trade in goods and services and reciprocal investment in third markets”, according to the CEOE in a press release. The co-presidents of this bilateral Council, Sylvia Escovar on the Colombian side and Íñigo Fernández de Mesa on the Spanish side, were also appointed. Narciso Casado and ANDI’s executive vice-president, Paola Buendía, were appointed as secretaries.
In the conversation following the signing, in which the Spanish ambassador in Bogotá, Joaquín de Arístegui, and the president of ProColombia, Flavia Santoro, participated, Fernández de Mesa stated that the new Business Council “will contribute to the development of our businesses, to the trade of goods and services between both countries and to reciprocal investment and investment in third markets”. Likewise, he added, it will help to strengthen cooperation between both business organizations, to develop strategic synergies between companies and favor productivity and to contribute to the implementation and dissemination of the trade agreements signed by the EU-Spain and Colombia.
“We hope that the agreement we signed and the establishment of our Council will be the beginning to further energize our activities and provide us with the framework to work on concrete projects that benefit the business sector we represent and thereby support the transformation that our societies need,” said Bruce Mac Master.
For his part, Narciso Casado explained that the objective of the Council is to serve as a support tool for the companies of both countries, for which it interacts with the other tools that already exist, such as Embassies, trade offices, ICEX-Invest in Spain or its Colombian equivalent, ProColombia. He also announced that Spain will host the Colombia Investment Roadshow on May 4 and 5, the main European event on investment in Colombia, organized by the CEOE and ProColombia, which, in its fifth edition, will be attended by government representatives, as well as leading Colombian and European companies and senior officials from multilateral organizations.
