At the beginning of the pandemic, in March and April, “everything was creeping in. Not anymore. Now there are hotels that have gone to request a second ICO and have been denied, “he says. “Either direct aid arrives and we stop being an asshole, as we have done up to now, or this sector is going to get windy,” he says angrily.
ICOs “are not aid”
A hotelier in Platja d’en Bossa confirms this: «Now they are looking at us with a magnifying glass». The banks, he indicates, have been the instrument “for ICO aid to arrive, but bank solvency criteria have been applied for its concession, so they have not reached everyone.” He believes that, in reality, these credits “only served to secure debts with the banks, generating new ones.” In other words, «the banks did it to safeguard their credits, they gave money to defer their risks [los de la entidad financiera]. The sector asks for real aid, because what they have given us so far with the ICOs they are not. The companies have been covered with their own assets, with bank debt. The one who could, of course, “he warns.
40% more debt
In their case, they were forced to request an ICO “in order to continue paying the loan” with which they undertook a work and, in addition, “provision treasury for a reasonable time frame.” Their debt thus grew 40% compared to what they had at the beginning of March.
This businesswoman values that on February 3 “at last it was legislated on the moratoriums of the credits that the companies had before the covid”. In his opinion, this should have been the first measure: “They have allowed us to bleed ourselves 10 months with loans that are only viable with operations and having taken on debt to cover them.”
Banks “scared”
The owner of an 18-room hotel in Sant Josep understands, in this sense, that the bank “is concerned about the problem of solvency”, as the ability to repay loans “is increasingly compromised.” Hence, the banks “are beginning to get scared: there is no income and expenses accumulate, so as time passes the situation is more precarious.”
Like the Platja d’en Bossa businesswoman, she believes that the recent royal decree law that allows debts to be transferred to the future “may alleviate the situation somewhat”, but recalls that the banking system “is a business and tries to avoid bad loans.” Sure, because they are not charitable NGOs.
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