Elena Marín, an official with the Las Palmas Port Authority and president of the blue economy committee of Primero Canarias (Prica), is reportedly among the people in Teodoro Sosa’s inner circle who could run alongside Marcial Morales for Las Palmas City Council, or alongside Sosa himself in the May 2027 elections for the Cabildo of Gran Canaria. Marín entered politics with the support of Rafael Robaina, former rector of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC). The official has drawn attention because of a judicial front stalled by alleged defensive tactics. The official’s alleged procedural strategy — she chose to file a criminal complaint against the port authority’s leadership, arguing that disciplinary measures and her reassignment to another department constituted retaliation after she refused to alter a report — would have succeeded in bogging down the progress of the proceedings.
The core of the judicial proceedings revolves around the actions of the former head of Public Domain, now with Prica. Through a succession of internal complaints filed via the institution’s ethics channel and criminal complaints, alleged systematic transfers of confidential information to the consulting firm Análisis Ingenieros, co-owned by her partner, have been documented. The emails added to the cases — which, given their volume and level of confidential detail, resemble a kind of homegrown WikiLeaks — reveal an alleged patronage network of internal collaboration in which the official forwarded technical files, land assessments, reports on the lighthouses of Fuerteventura and even editable drafts containing messages as explicit as “you can copy things from here too” or “in case it’s useful. Kisses.” Canarias 7 reported this.
Capella Doctrine
The administrative decision is based on a report issued by Salvador Capella, director of the Port of La Luz and Las Palmas, who concluded that there were no “actions from which rational indications of a possible very serious disciplinary offense could be inferred.” The decision responds to a complaint filed by businessman Juan Luis Bethencourt Gallego, who accused the official of allegedly favoring the commercial interests of her partner, engineer Hubert Lang-Lenton Barrera, at the expense of the public interest and by supplying confidential information from the port authority’s files to Análisis Ingenieros SL, as La Provincia reported in 2018.
Leak of Competitors’ Projects
The alleged scheme of institutional favoritism went beyond mere assistance with public tenders. Complaints filed as early as 2019 revealed the alleged leaking of projects belonging to competing companies and private individuals seeking port land in strategic locations such as Arinaga and La Luz. Data on petroleum product pipelines, environmental requirements and internal drafts signed by management ended up in the hands of the private consultancy before their official notification. This alleged breach of document custody not only compromised the interests of private operators but also undermined the guarantees of competitive transparency at the largest port in the Canary Islands.
Slowness in the Disciplinary Process
This technical paralysis would benefit the defense’s timetable while the port authority’s leadership attempts to reorganize the handling of the internal disciplinary proceedings. After the Board of Directors delegated to the president of the Port Authority, Beatriz Calzada, the powers to initiate proceedings because the port director had been recused — he is involved in the criminal complaints filed by the official herself — the administrative machinery is moving at an exasperatingly slow pace.
The result is a scenario of alleged deferred impunity in which documentary evidence concerning leaks of key files at the Port of Las Palmas remains stalled in court. The justice system’s inability to resolve the labor and criminal aspects in a coordinated manner not only delays the clarification of individual responsibility but also casts a deep shadow of doubt over legal certainty and the operational integrity of the Canary Islands’ port system.
The article Elena Marín Enters Politics Alongside Teodoro Sosa in Las Palmas was first published on canarymaritime.com.
