Public procurement in the Canary Islands is full of paradoxes worthy of a textbook. The Santa Cruz de Tenerife Port Authority, chaired by Pedro Suárez López, issued a tender with a precise objective: to hire external legal counsel on public procurement for its Procurement and Compliance Division. The contract, with an estimated value of €111,226.50, was intended to provide legal protection for tenders at the port. This took place months after the arrival of Pablo Nieto, the resigned director of the Port of Tenerife, whose official reason for leaving remains unknown.
The irony emerged during the drafting of the tender documents themselves. Lawyer Manuel Freddy Santos Padrón, a trusted attorney of José Manuel Bermúdez, Tenerife’s ports councillor and mayor of Santa Cruz, detected that the Port Authority had committed a basic legal error in the tender to hire, precisely, its procurement advisers. Santos Padrón filed a Special Appeal in Public Procurement Matters, alleging a breach of Article 116.4.c of the Public Sector Contracts Law: the port had failed to state the reasons for or justify the award criteria required of bidders.
Faced with the clear legal blunder, the Port Authority was forced to accept the appeal. Pedro Suárez himself signed the resolution that annulled the tender documents for his own procurement process due to the lack of proper reasoning, acknowledging the procedure’s invalidity from the outset. It is now 2026, and nothing is known about the tender.
A key lawyer in Tenerife’s public-sector machinery
The lawyer who brought down the tender for the Santa Cruz port is no stranger to the islands’ institutional network. Santos Padrón, who is linked to Santa Cruz de Tenerife’s political sphere, has gradually taken on responsibilities at various public entities across the archipelago.
In October 2025, he took over as secretary of the board of directors of the public company Proexca following the dismissal of María Estrella Martín, sister of Pedro Martín, former president of the Tenerife Island Council and the island’s PSOE leader. From his external position as a lawyer and compliance specialist, Santos Padrón has regularly provided legal, commercial and procurement advice to public entities. Between May and September 2025, he secured legal-assistance contracts with Proexca itself, the Gerencia del Parque Marítimo Santa Cruz S.A., the Fundación Canaria Santa Cruz Sostenible and the Sociedad de Desarrollo de Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
His latest commercial registry entry appeared at Proexca, where he corrected the term of office of chief executive Pablo Martín Carbajal González, setting his mandate to run until September 21, 2029. This temporal safeguard extends beyond the current regional legislative term and will force the government emerging from the ballot box in May 2027 either to retain the executive or face the corresponding compensation for his dismissal.
The article Bermúdez’s lawyer who voided Tenerife Port tender to teach Pedro Suárez how to award contracts was first published on canarymaritime.com.
