They don’t even hide it: it is now a mechanism where even officials, tired of bullying or being mocked by higher authorities for the lottery of exceptions, dare not do anything other than hold their noses. It is the culmination of a system that has replaced reality with procedure. It is not just inefficiency; it is a subsidy engineering where logistics bends to the form to extract every last gram of public profitability. The people of the Canary Islands think that this is paid for by Brussels, but no: it comes from IGIC, the Canary Island VAT, and from the income tax of the islanders.
These are the European aids for the transport of goods. The heart of the deception lies in the methodology for calculating the so-called ‘typical costs’. According to a complaint from the National Commission on Markets and Competition (CNMC) this 2026, instead of being based on what an ‘efficiently and well-managed company’ would spend, the Ministry of Transport under Oscar Puente simply uses the average costs declared by the market operators themselves. This system allows less competitive companies, or those that inflate their expenses, to be rewarded, as the State only excludes those costs that exceed the average of the route by more than 50%. That is to say, any inefficiency or excess cost that remains below this generous margin of 50% is fully subsidized with public money, generating what regulators call ‘perverse incentives’. Here you can read the CNMC report that has used data from Ineco.
The Mystery of T20 vs T40
Drastic increases in typical costs for small containers (T20) have been detected on multiple routes, while for large containers (T40) costs have remained completely unchanged. In the routes between non-capital islands – Cádiz (agricultural), the costs for agricultural products have increased by 53%, but for industrial goods, the cost has not been updated. What agricultural cargo is being exported from the Canary Islands to the Peninsula intensively?
The report reveals a trend shift in 2025 that favors a constant drip of increases: 23 adjustments to typical costs are proposed, and absolutely all are upward; there is no reduction on any route. The average increases are 26.5% for agricultural products and 24.8% for industrial goods. For the Ministry to raise a typical cost, it is now enough that 50% of the aid requests from the previous year have exceeded the cap (previously, 80% or 65% was required). This greatly facilitates that the maximum subsidized price rises artificially each year.
The CNMC harshly criticizes that the Ministry only discards the costs declared by shipping companies that exceed the average by more than 50%. Any inefficiency or excess cost that is below that huge margin (for example, an inflated expense of 40% over the average) is accepted and funded with public money as if it were a legitimate cost of a well-managed company.
Filters: The Case of INECO and Ministerial Opacity
The lack of rigor starts in the administrative process. Currently, the methodology for showering millions on the sector is not established in a law or Ministerial Order, but rather it is the public company INECO that develops and applies it at its whim year after year. Although the CNMC has repeatedly demanded that this procedure be transparent and formally approved, the Ministry has ignored these warnings, maintaining a system where the data declared by shipping companies are not subjected to any ‘critical qualitative analysis’. The State simply processes mathematically what companies say they spend, without verifying whether those figures have any economic reasonableness or if they are just an invention to capture as much aid as possible.
Bloody Arbitraries: The Case of Tenerife and La Palma
The scandal takes shape when analyzing discrepancies in routes. For example, in the technical reports of 2025, it is noted that the typical cost for the air transport of industrial goods between Tenerife and La Palma skyrocketed by 83% in just one year. However, for the same route and the same airplane, if the transported items are agricultural products, the cost miraculously does not rise by a penny. These brutal differences, lacking any logical technical justification, reveal a manipulation of costs to favor specific business niches, totally distorting the market and the purpose of the aid.
Article written by Raquel Molina. Edited and verified by José L. Jiménez. Information cross-checked without institutional filters. This analysis has not been financed by official advertising nor conditioned by lobby interests.
