How we read Spanish registry positions

The BORME publishes each company officer's position as an abbreviation — ADM. SOLID., CONS.INDEPEN, M.COM.NOM.RE — and has never published a table expanding them. There is no official dictionary to consult. Informa, Axesor and libreborme each decode these with a private in-house one, and so do we. The difference we can offer is that ours is written down.

This page is that dictionary, and the reasoning behind it. It matters because the abbreviation decides something consequential: whether we report a person as a director of a Spanish company.

How we decide who is a director

Four offices make someone a director outright: administrador, consejero, presidente and vicepresidente — along with a seat on a governing body that is not a board of directors, such as a cooperative's consejo rector or an association's junta directiva.

A seat on a committee of the board also counts. Under the Spanish Companies Act the audit committee and the nominations and remuneration committee of a listed company may be composed only of non-executive directors, so the registry inscribing someone to one of them is itself evidence that they sit on the board. This is not a technicality: a director can be missing from the registry's list of consejeros and still be plainly on the board through a committee seat.

Three things that look like board work and are not: a comisión de control is the supervisory organ of pension funds and credit cooperatives, elected by the assembly and expressly outside the board; a comisión liquidadora winds a company up; a comisión de acreedores represents creditors in an insolvency. Together they account for more than thirty thousand seats in our data, and none of them makes anyone a director.

Where the registry says outright that a seat is held by someone who is not a consejero, we record the organ and honour the denial.

What we do when we cannot read an abbreviation

We default to denying it. The registry vocabulary contains 543 codes naming an organ, and roughly two hundred of them name ad-hoc committees whose meaning cannot be recovered from the abbreviation and for which no primary source exists. Those are never treated as directorships, and they are shown with the code kept visible so you can check the BORME entry yourself:

• PRE.COM.FVS → Chair of a committee (PRE.COM.FVS)
• COM.GERENCIA → Committee (COM.GERENCIA)
• MIEM.COM.FIN → Member of a committee (MIEM.COM.FIN)
• MBRO.COM.CRT → Member of a committee (MBRO.COM.CRT)

Guessing in the other direction would put a person on a board the registry never placed them on, which is the one error in this domain that cannot be walked back.

Where our expansions come from

Three kinds, in descending order of how much they assert:

1. Composed mechanically. The office comes from the classification and the qualifiers are tokens the abbreviation already contains — ADM.SOLIDAR. is "Administrador" plus SOLID. Nothing is supplied that the code does not already carry.
2. Named from a cited source. The consejero classes — executive, proprietary, independent, other external — are those of art. 529 duodecies of the Companies Act, not our coinage. Committee names follow the Act and the good governance code. Where we have promoted an individual code we have done it on a BORME filing that printed the expansion in prose beside the abbreviation.
3. Kept verbatim. Everything else. An abbreviation we cannot read is shown as the registry wrote it.

What we refuse is a fourth kind: a plausible-sounding expansion with nothing behind it. A machine-generated mapping we tested decoded ECONORE as "económico y de honores" when it is nombramientos y retribuciones, and CRT as "riesgos y transferencias" when it is control — the one family that must never confer a directorship. Both would have read perfectly well to someone who did not already know.

The families, and how each is shown

These are families rather than a list of all 1,191 codes, because our labels are composed rather than looked up: a family stays correct when the registry coins a new spelling of the same office. Every expansion below is generated from the same code that renders a company page, so what you see here is what you will see there.

Administrador (director)

The governing body where there is no board. The abbreviation says how the office is exercised: sole, joint and several (each may act alone), joint (they must sign together), or insolvency-appointed.

Yes — a directorship.

Consejero and its classes

A member of the board of directors. The classes — executive, proprietary, independent and other external — are those of art. 529 duodecies of the Companies Act, not a categorisation of ours.

Yes — a directorship.

Consejero delegado (managing director)

A director to whom the board has delegated its powers. It is a delegation layered on a board seat, not a separate seat: when the registry ceases only the delegation, the person remains a director.

Yes — a directorship.

Chair and deputy chair

The chair of the governing body. A non-executive chair is still a director — "non-executive" describes how the office is held, it does not deny it.

Yes — a directorship.

Vocal (ordinary board member)

A vocal naming no organ is a director holding no special office. Where the abbreviation does name an organ (VOC1.CON.REC), we classify it by that organ instead.

Yes — a directorship.

Governing council, executive board

The governing body of cooperatives, associations and mutual societies. A seat on one IS the directorship, exactly as a board seat is.

Yes — a directorship.

Audit committee

A committee of the board. The law reserves its membership to non-executive directors, so the seat is itself evidence of a directorship. "Auditoría y control" and "auditoría y cumplimiento" are this committee, not a comisión de control.

Yes — a directorship.

Nominations and remuneration committee

A committee of the board, its membership likewise reserved to non-executive directors.

Yes — a directorship.

Executive, delegated, risk and other board committees

Internal committees of the board. A committee joins this group only when we can identify it; the rest stay out (see below).

Yes — a directorship.

Comisión de control (supervisory committee)

The supervisory organ of pension funds and credit cooperatives, elected by the assembly and expressly not part of the board. 26,511 seats in the corpus, and never a directorship.

Never a directorship.

Liquidation and creditors’ committees

The first winds the company up; the second represents creditors in an insolvency. Neither is corporate governance.

Never a directorship.

Seats marked expressly "not a director"

The registry sometimes states outright that the holder is not a director. We keep the organ and honour the denial.

Never a directorship.

Apoderado (attorney-in-fact)

A power of attorney, not an organic office. This is the most common misreading of a Spanish registry from abroad: an apoderado is not a director.

Not a governing-body office.

Secretary and deputy secretary

A board secretary may or may not be a director, and the registry says so when it matters. We therefore do not count the office as a directorship unless another seat establishes one.

Not a governing-body office.

Liquidator

The person winding up a dissolved company. In a company in liquidation they are the only person with authority over it, so the company page shows them alongside the governing body.

Not a governing-body office.

Auditor

The statutory auditor, principal or alternate, and the consolidated-accounts auditor. External to the company by definition.

Not a governing-body office.

Permanent representative (art. 143 RRM)

The natural person exercising the office when the director is itself a company. An organic appointment rather than a power of attorney, which is why it appears on the governing body.

Yes — a directorship.

Senior management

Executive management. A director general may also sit on the board, but the office alone does not make them a director.

Not a governing-body office.

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