Volkswagen insists after meeting with Chivite: there is no funding for the Navarra battery plant
The management of Volkswagen Navarra has informed the plant’s works council this Thursday that there is no news regarding the battery cell assembly plant that the unions want to be located within the facilities of the Pamplona factory. After investing 4.5 billion euros in Sagunto, Valencia insists that there is no money for the new plant in Navarra.
This Wednesday, the Government of Navarra, after meeting with the factory’s management, said that Volkswagen Navarra is working on the installation of a battery assembly plant for the electric car that would be located in the Landaben factory itself.
The president of the works council, Alfredo Morales, reminded the media that a week ago the company’s management reported that the battery assembly plant “was a necessary and attractive project for Volkswagen Navarra, but it was a project that was not currently funded”.
For this reason, “in view of the news that has been coming out in the last few hours”, he said, a meeting was held with the plant’s management in which the unions asked if there was any news to notify the workforce “or even to celebrate”.
The management, he added, “has confirmed that there has been no change, that everything remains the same, that it continues to ratify that it is a very necessary project for our plant, but that it still lacks funding”.
The double-speak of Chivite’s regional government
Pedro Sánchez, with his support for Volkswagen’s 4.5 billion investment in Sagunto, Valencia, has left the socialist Chivite in a very bad place in Navarre, which is why her government is trying to manoeuvre, albeit with little success. Yesterday, 12 April, she set up a meeting with the heads of Volkswagen Navarra, which the regional government published in a note, a meeting in which no agreement or commitment was reached on the part of the German multinational. In its note, Chivite’s government pointed out that after the meeting, headed by its president María Chivite, with Volkswagen Navarra’s management staff, it assured that it had received detailed information on the company’s new project and that the design of the new plant had been revealed.
The Government of Navarre, for its part, explained to the Volkswagen Navarra officials present the existing tax and aid framework that could be used to carry it forward.
The same sources pointed out that this battery assembly plant for the electric models manufactured in Landaben was not included in the project of regional interest approved by the Government of Navarre for the electrification plan of the Volkswagen plant.
For their part, the news was received with caution by the trade unions, who were already aware of the project but also that Volkswagen is considering outsourcing this work.
Sources from the works council told Efe that they were unaware of the terms of this meeting, and pointed out that this is one of the workers’ demands, that VW itself should take on the assembly inside the factory, which would generate more jobs, “but so far we have been told that there is no financing for this investment“, which is close to 300 million euros.
“We know that there is a project to do it inside the factory. We know that it is viable and profitable, but we are told that for the moment they do not have the necessary funding. At the same time, we know that they are apparently working with another supplier to carry out these processes outside the factory”, said the same sources in order to lower expectations.
