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High hopes of a deal on Spanish pensions
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While the debate continues in La Linea about the payment of upgraded pensions to former Spanish workers in Gibraltar, the Spanish official leading the tripartite talks for Spain, director for Europe Jose Pons, plans to visit La Linea this week.
Meanwhile a day in late June has been pencilled in for yet another trilateral meeting, which it is hoped will be the last one prior to a full ministerial meeting.
At a meeting in La Linea, between 400 and 600 pensioners gathered to hear the latest about the state of the pensions, which is essentially what PANORAMA published on 22 May.
The trilateral meetings have led to a plan whereby lump sum' payments will be made to Spanish pensioners as a full and final settlement to this never-ending issue, which finds its roots when the late Franco regime closed the frontier and withdrew the Spanish workforce in Gibraltar at the end of the Sixties.
The plan now is to create a 'pensions kitty', to be funded by Britain and Spain, and which will be administered by the Spanish treasury.
Payments will be made to the Spanish pensioners, but not to heirs and successor, as the Spanish had wanted, or to widows of former pensioners.
Sr Pons recently met with pensioners representatives in Madrid and recommended that the pensioners accepted the deal.
With hope in the air, the pensioners have postponed - again- any protests, unless there is no final agreement by the end of June.
Sr Pons has told them that if there is no agreement on the pensions there will be no agreement on anything else, meaning the airport, telephones and frontier.
Sr Pons has been telling PSOE aides that little remains to be settled before a deal is done.
Last week the Gibraltar government told PANORAMA: "Nothing in relation to a possible pensions deal has been agreed, including the model and who pays what."
For their part, PSOE politicians in the Campo area are expressing optimism about a deal, describing the pensions issue as "one of the biggest social injustices ever in Andalucia."
For the Gibraltar Pensioners Association, if the Spaniards receive updated pensions, so must Gibraltar pensioners.
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