The Velazquez exhibition at the National Gallery, just up the road from Legal Week‘s headquarters on Haymarket, is sponsored by the enduring UK building society-cum-bank Abbey. Appropriately enough, however, Abbey is actually owned by Spain’s Banco Santander Centro Hispanico.
It has been noted more than once in Legal Week how companies across continental Europe have been taking advantage of the UK’s liberal takeover rules to snap up household names. Such tactics have been taking place without so much of a murmur of jingoism in the City, although more than a few eyebrows have been raised on this side of the Channel about the desirability of some of the protectionist goings-on on the Continent.
