The management of Renfe in Catalonia now has a new manager: Òscar Playà, the recently appointed CEO of Rodalies Catalunya, the new company that will take over the transfer of Rodalies. Playà will assume the functions that until this week Josep Enric Garcia Alemany, the operating director of Rodalies, was dismissed following the railway crisis that Catalonia has experienced in the last week. The decision was announced by the Secretary of State for Transport, José Antonio Santano, in an interview with 3cat.
In the interview, Santano explained that Playà will have a “dual role”, and he stressed that, given that Rodalies is a company in which Renfe participates, “it is reasonable” that the person “consensus” by Generalitat and Renfe – and therefore by the ministry – “can take care of the whole operation”. “It’s a good time to eliminate this bicephaly and improve coordination, he added.”
Hours earlier, ERC’s spokeswoman in Parliament, Ester Capella, had asked the minister for Territory, Housing and Ecological Transition, Sílvia Paneque, that the new head of the Rodalies joint venture take over the management of Renfe Catalunya.
In the framework of a questioning in Parliament this Wednesday, Capella has affirmed that the railway crisis experienced in recent days shows that “the time has come to speed up” the transfer. In the reply, Paneque shared that the crisis opens up an “opportunity” for Catalonia to “integrate into the operations and the infrastructure itself” of the new company.
