Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:41 pm on 6 November 2018.
In terms of the scale of the problem, perhaps I can provide the First Minister with some information. Since the summer of last year, the civil engineering company Alun Griffiths from Abergavenny has been sold to Tarmac. Gap Personnel from Wrexham, one of the five largest recruitment companies in Britain, has been sold to Trust Tech from Japan. Princes Gate, from Pembrokeshire, one of the eight largest mineral water companies in the UK has been bought by Nestlé. Even in your own constituency, there are two substantial Welsh companies that have been bought by foreign companies recently: Harris Pye engineers, a company like Alun Griffiths, with a turnover of over £100 million, was purchased by Joulon from France, and Aircraft Maintenance Services has been purchased by the American company JBT. There’s been some talk about the missing middle. At this rate we’ll have nothing left soon. So, can you confirm whether your Government made any request to the market and competitions commission to prevent any of these sales, and do you accept that one of the problems is that the bank of Wales currently doesn’t have the financial capacity to fund the management buy-outs at the necessary scale? One or two of these deals would take all of the bank's annual funding, so isn’t it now time to look at what’s being offered in Scotland, which is a far greater fund and which could ensure that we are in a position to offer alternative options to these companies rather than being sold?