The Sick Man Of Mallorca: Chemists

The chap who runs my local pharmacy, who I suppose I should therefore refer to as the pharmacist, habitually wears a resigned expression. It is one that has been forlornly chiselled from years of what happens over the counter.

This sufferance is at its most patient when he has been on the receiving end of a German interrogation. “They ask so many questions,” he once sighed. Observing a German tourist in full chemist-shop inquisition mode confirms what he says. The boxes of creams, pills, sprays are first examined and the leaflet then removed and gone through item by item, a difficult enough process if you can read and speak Spanish but considerably more so if you can’t.

Get in a chemist shop queue behind a bunch of Germans and you are most likely to die before it comes to your turn. However, as I pointed out to the pharmacist, his fellow island men and women could test the patience of any saintly Joan, Jaume or Cati the chemist. His resigned expression can swiftly turn to a laugh.

Mallorcans have an unnerving habit of repeating everything you say to them. In the pharmacy, such parrotting results in delays that not even German hypochondriacs could cause (and trust me when I say that Germans are hypochondriacs; it’s a consequence of their health system).

Another unnerving Mallorcan habit, one especially among older Mallorcan stock, is to stare blankly at an interlocutor once the exchange has supposedly ended. The blankness demands that the whole exchange is then repeated. Not once more but at least twice more. An ingrained and conditioned compliance with Spanish bureaucracy demands that any encounter is done in triplicate, and the chemist shop encounter is no different.

The British tourist, on the other hand, is unlikely to delay the pharmacist for too long. Indeed, the encounter can be over very swiftly if the Brit tourist senses he or she might not be being understood and so leaves in embarrassment. But actually verbalising symptoms is rarely necessary. Pointing is a universal language, as in pointing at a violent sunburn, at a throbbing head and a green tinge to the gills, at a Vesuvian mosquito eruption.

Ask yourselves this. What is the most important service required by a tourist? A bar, a supermarket, a taxi? No, none of these. It’s the chemists. It’s why I am full of admiration of my pharmacist, his fellow pharmassistants, and indeed all other pharmacy personnel in Mallorca’s tourist areas. Just think what they have to put up with. Next time you see Helga from Hamburg dissecting the meaning of all the “uso de otros medicamentos” etc., then you’ll begin to understand why I am sympathetic to their cause.

And this cause is all the greater because they don’t get paid what they should get paid.

Publicity that has been given to the rotten state of finances at the tourism ministry has tended to overshadow the fact that IB-Salut, the regional health authority, is also on the critical list. It is IB-Salut that is meant to divvy up to the pharmacies, and it hasn’t. For May and June, some 36 million euros remain unpaid. The chemists are threatening to pull down the shutters on 29 July and it is uncertain how long they might keep them down.

There would still be a chemist in a local area that stays open, but the convenience of having five chemists, which, as an example, is the case in Puerto Alcúdia, would go.

Shutting the shop might seem like cutting off the chemist’s nose to spite his face, but unlike the pathetic attempt by bars to protest against the effects of the smoking ban by closing for a few hours (a protest only undertaken by a collection of bars in Palma and one that had absolutely no impact), this lockout is potentially far more serious and far more meaningful.

Everything in Mallorca pretty much links in with tourism, and the chemists are no exception. They are, as I suggest, one of the most important tourism services. There is going to be some major inconvenience if the chemists go ahead with their threat and if it is observed with anything like solidarity. Idiot barowners closing for a couple of hours is irrelevant, airport workers striking can be put down to bolshy unions, but chemists effectively going on strike is a very different matter. When people’s health comes into the equation, the potential harm to reputation and image is way greater than anything that baggage handlers or air-traffic control can conjure up.

It needs sorting out, and it needs sorting out pretty damn quick.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Chain Reaction: Bankruptcies and non-payments

Spain’s economic woes are receiving plenty of airing, but what about what is happening on the ground? The crisis is such that one has an impression that much economic life in Mallorca is all but grinding to a halt, brought about by a lack of credit, non-payments, negative cash flows and bankruptcies.

Businesses in Mallorca are caught in the chain reaction of the absence of liquidity in both the private and public sectors. Of the latter, those affected are suppliers to town halls and other governmental bodies and those linked directly to government agencies. Take chemists, for instance. Some had started posting notices to the effect that they could not supply prescriptions through the local health system because the health agency, IB-Salut, was not paying them. IB-Salut, and its problems have been known about for months, is another division of regional government, like the tourism ministry, so in debt that the government is having to bail it out. The government has at least sought to reassure the chemists and patients of the health system that prescriptions will be guaranteed.

The town halls, notorious as bad payers even in the good times, can typically take six months or more in honouring invoices. The Council of Mallorca has had to reach into its pockets to give the town halls some cash that they cannot otherwise raise because central government has imposed restrictions on their capacity to borrow and thus get into further debt.

It’s not all bad news. One town hall, Alcúdia’s, is being reimbursed by central government, following a protracted legal battle to get back IVA which was wrongly charged to its services agency, EMSA. The 600,000 or so euros that the court has so far agreed to could rise. In the meantime, the repaid IVA will help to clear debts the town hall has to suppliers.

If only all town halls or businesses could benefit from such windfalls. If only, especially for smaller businesses, there were mechanisms to prevent their bankruptcy when faced with what is an increasingly common occurrence, the protection of voluntary administration by larger businesses which then do not make payments while they buy time to try and sort out their affairs. For the smaller businesses, their suppliers, there simply isn’t the time. And so they try and come to agreements with their own creditors or go bust and then find themselves blacklisted by banks.

The main business sectors affected have been construction, hostelry (in its widest sense, to include hotels as well as restaurants etc.) and transport. And there have been some big names that have got into difficulty. One of these is Marsans, formerly the ultimate owner, through the hotel chain Hotetur, of the Bellevue complex in Alcúdia. The sale of Marsans’ businesses earlier this year looked as though it might have brought salvation. The problems have persisted, though the new owners seem to have arrived at a solution that will see creditors paid and so stave off a court order that was to place Hotetur in voluntary administration, one that creditors had not sought when urging the court to force bankruptcy in pursuit of the money they were owed.

Even if a solution is found, there is also the effect on local business confidence to be taken into account. In the case of the huge Bellevue, any uncertainty sets the rumour mill ablaze, one not helped by staff being paid only 70% of their October salaries (as was being reported in the middle of November). Just the threat of administration for a major employer and purchaser of services, to say nothing of supplier of tourists, is sufficient to drain even more life from the sick body of the local economy.

Lawyers have expressed concerns about the bankruptcy law which came into force in 2004. It was one, they say, drafted at a time when things were good and when bankruptcy was relatively uncommon. Since 2008 the trickle has become an avalanche. While voluntary status has its benefits for the company facing bankruptcy, it does little for suppliers.

One lawyer has described the system as an abuse of the law, and the overwhelming majority of companies that enter administration subsequently fail, some of them emerging later under new names with new owners, for example, a son or daughter, thus getting around the banks’ blacklist. It has been said that the law makes it easy to simply close and disappear but also to get re-established in a different guise. And then perhaps to set the same chain reaction in motion, of smaller businesses, the suppliers, being left unpaid and ending up going to the wall all over again.

The chain reaction is likely to continue, likely to get worse. You can also describe the situation as a vicious circle, and the question is when or if the circle will be broken, because there is no sign of it being so.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.