A slaughterhouse for divers. The Port of Las Palmas is home to an overwhelming majority of companies, shipping agents and operators that invest fortunes in safety, comply scrupulously with regulations and pay the true cost of protecting their workers. That is why it is so bitter to witness the indifference with which the Labor Inspectorate observed the maneuver carried out by a handful of pirates. While serious firms operating in the port face suffocating oversight, Otech Marine Services and its partners in the Laskaridis Group, linked to Asepeyo, needed only to deploy a cost-cutting ruse to leave a 23-year-old diver severely disabled under the passive gaze of the competent authority.
The Port of Las Palmas is an ideal setting for administrative indifference. Amid the stench of heavy fuel and the ashen light of La Luz, labor inspectors quickly understand that life is merely a bureaucratic exercise involving files to archive and papers to stamp. Workplace accidents are nothing more than an acceptable metric on an Excel spreadsheet; by that logic, Lewis Beddows’ collapse at the age of 23 is almost poetic in its statistical irrelevance. A shattered body with irreversible neurological damage does not change the time the office closes or ruffle the inspecting authority.
The mechanism behind the tragedy was reassuringly mediocre for any unscrupulous bureaucrat. A vessel consigned by Hamilton (Transcoma), repaired at the Laskaridis Group’s shipyards and operated through Otech Marine Services’ subcontracting on the Ocean Great White platform. Everything was arranged for negligence to proceed without disrupting routine inspections. The young man’s father, Derek Beddows — a veteran international auditor at corporations such as BP and Technip — laid bare in August 2026 the true nature of this unpunished botched job carried out in December 2018.
Cost-cutting that the Labor Inspectorate let pass
The accident resulted from a chain of incompetence that any labor inspector with a minimum of apathy would have signed off on while looking the other way. There was a hyperbaric chamber on the dock, but it was useless because “the supervisor did not know how to use it; if he had known how to properly manage basic air dives, it would not have been necessary, but he could not even do that!” Meanwhile, the chamber at the port facilities was not operational because Otech’s project manager chose to save costs by failing to give notice that the diving operation was beginning and saving on the local doctor “because he believed the worst-case scenario would never happen.” A textbook fraud that the Las Palmas Labor Inspectorate swallowed without asking uncomfortable questions.
The emergency protocol was a paper farce: “a totally defective response plan that could never have worked.” It took six hours for recompression to arrive after the decompression accident. “The result? A 23-year-old diver with everything to look forward to, seated training, an exciting and promising career, all lost, gone, and left with neurological challenges for the rest of his life.” After “a week in hospital, countless chamber treatments and experiences that were far too dark,” the young man was left out of action.
The joke of the quality seal and Greek cynicism
For the Labor Inspectorate, the incident was the perfect routine matter: filed away as a marginal mishap involving itinerant labor. Derek Beddows denounces “those rogue contractors who hide behind their IMCA certificate, which is just a colored A4 sheet of paper in a nice frame on the boardroom wall.” But the final touch to this monument to impunity came from the Greek company itself, which dismissed the father with the cold condescension of an email in corporate English: “We are sorry to hear what happened to your son (…), but unfortunately, things like this continue to happen everywhere… even if we were not involved (sic) in this area of the project.” The company’s website states that they handled him.
A simple “these things happen” was enough to close the file on a mutilated young man in Canarian waters. In Las Palmas, inspectors looked the other way while the pirates cut costs and laughed at the law right in their faces. There was no accident: there was complacency, corporate arrogance and a Labor Inspectorate that preferred the easy paperwork to demonstrating who is in charge at the Port of Las Palmas.
The article Blessed Labor Inspectorate: Otech and Laskaridis’ farce shames Las Palmas Port was first published on canarymaritime.com.
