(February 18, 2014) As Catalonia’s secession movement gains new momentum, Albert Pont, the leader of a Catalan pro-independence business lobby, recently called out part of the national debt owed by the government of Spain — estimated at 962 billion euros in 2013, its highest level in a century — as “odious debt.” In the event of separation from Spain, Pont said that while an independent Catalonia — currently a province widely known as “the factory of Spain” and as the country’s wealthiest region — would be willing to “assume part of [the Spanish] debt; obviously, a proportionate one…. there are shares of the debt that we are not responsible for.”