The day of the European agencies has arrived. Today it is being decided where to establish the new headquarters of the EMA, the European Medicines Agency, and of the EBA, the European Banking Agency. For the first, Milan and Bratislava are in pole position.
Up for grabs is the arrival of 900 high-income employees as well as events and demonstrations involving around 70 participants a year, for a turnover of 1,7 billion euros.
If the game was based only on the offer, the Italian city would have already won. The Lombard capital has an office ready to be attributed to the EMA (the skyscraper of the Pirellone), it is in a central position on the continent, it can count on the services of three airports and has an efficient hotel system, already tested with the experience of Expo .
Bratislava, on the other hand, is a small city, with less than half a million inhabitants, and to support the traffic of personnel it should rely on the Vienna airport. Furthermore, it seems that most of the EMA employees would rather resign than go to work in Slovakia.
Nonetheless, in the end Bratislava could win thanks to the support of Germany, inclined to satisfy the requests of the so-called Visegrad group (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) and thus obtain its support for Frankfurt's candidacy for the EBA. Not to mention that, at the moment, no European agency is based in an Eastern European country.
