Author: Bob James

Football Match Fixing
A match-fixing scandal has hit Spanish football with Valencia’s final day win at Real Valladolid among the games under suspicion.
The news came yesterday as 11 people were arrested for alleged match fixing including the president of Huesca football club.
The other names include former Spain and Real Madrid player Raul Bravo and Borja Fernandez, who’s now retired from football.
Carlos Aranda, a Real Madrid youth product who played for several top flight clubs and Íñigo López Montaña, a player of Deportivo de La Coruña and formerly of Huesca were also among the detainees.… Read all the news

Job Cuts
The Spanish arm of Japanese carmaker Nissan has reached an agreement with unions to cut 600 jobs at its plant in Barcelona, or almost 20 percent of the workforce.
The layoffs, a mixture of voluntary redundancies and early retirements over the next year, were a condition for a planned investment of 70 million euros in a new painting facility.
Nissan, which has five plants and employs around 5,000 people in Spain, reached the agreement after more than a month of negotiations with unions.… Read all the news

Catalonia
Catalonia’s former separatist leader Carles Puigdemont yesterday urged caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to be open to dialogue with the independence movement but declined to say if his party would back him in parliament.
The Regions bid to break away from Spain was at the heart of the election, which Sanchez’s Socialists won but without enough seats to have a majority on their own.
Puigdemont is still his party’s leading figure. Although he did not stand in the parliamentary election last month, he will run in the upcoming EU vote though.… Read all the news