They saw it coming. The selection process for the management of the Fundación Canaria Puertos de Las Palmas, launched last July, has fallen apart. What was supposed to be a lightning-fast appointment under a declared “urgent procedure” to fill the vacant executive post has turned into a full-blown administrative crisis threatening to ensnare the leadership of both the entity and the Las Palmas Port Authority. At Puertos del Estado, where the first complaint was received with satisfaction, there was little understanding of how businesspeople—including a veterinarian—could serve as the panel of experts selecting a new manager when the salary is paid by taxpayers. The members of this panel of experts also have personal cross-interests as clients of the Foundation itself.
Complaints filed in Madrid over the collapse of the timetable
The accumulation of inexplicable delays and the systematic failure to meet the deadlines set by the institution itself have exhausted the patience of at least one applicant, whose legal representatives have taken action: formal complaints before the State General Comptroller’s Office (IGAE) and the public entity Puertos del Estado. The move has received an exceptionally warm reception in Madrid. Sources familiar with the case confirm that the complaints have been welcomed with open satisfaction both within the IGAE and the National Audit Office (ONA)—regarded as the public sector’s genuine Central Operational Unit (UCO) for financial oversight.
The ONA and IGAE tighten the net around management
The oversight body had been scrutinizing the governance and management of the Canarian port foundation for some time, and this new front paves the way for a thorough audit of compliance with the law in its personnel and public-spending procedures.
The scandal’s background is not limited to the blatant failure to meet the administrative deadlines following the signing of the resolution by the chair of the Board of Trustees, Beatriz Calzada. It also includes the maze of internal contradictions affecting the call’s own terms. The call document is a catalogue of legal and technical inconsistencies that lays bare the haste and lack of rigor with which the process was organized.
Paper urgency and opaque terms
The false protection of urgency against real paralysis
Base 6.5 justifies halving the deadlines for correcting applications—to just five working days—by invoking an “imperative need to ensure continuity” and an “urgent procedure” resulting from the vacant management post. However, the Foundation itself was the first to blow up its own timetable, suspending the decision-making deadlines and incurring an unjustified delay that effectively nullifies the urgency invoked to curtail applicants’ rights.
In a move as unusual as it is contradictory, Base 2 expressly warns that the Foundation is undergoing a “strategic review” that could result in its “transformation, integration, or dissolution and liquidation.” Yet just a few pages later, Base 3.4 establishes that the senior-management employment contract to be signed will be of “indefinite duration,” with annual compensation of more than €61,000, requiring the future manager to act as the Foundation’s own liquidator while guaranteeing an initially permanent appointment.
A tailor-made arrangement that opens Pandora’s box
While Base 1 proclaims that the process is governed strictly by the principles of merit, ability, transparency and open competition—in accordance with Order TDF/379/2024—the merit-scoring system (Base 8.1.c) disproportionately favors experience in the “public port sector” (0.80 points per year) over experience in any other public administration (0.50 points) or in private senior management (0.30 points). It is a tailor-made design that artificially narrows the competitive process required by law.
Base 13.1 states that the final list of admitted applicants may be challenged through an appeal before the Foundation’s Board of Directors. However, since this is a senior-management employment contract governed by labor law and issued by an entity with the status of a public-sector foundation, the provision for purely administrative appeals conflicts with the labor courts’ own jurisdictional doctrine set out in the subsequent sections. With complaints already before the ONA and the IGAE’s appetite for oversight at its peak, the Foundation’s attempt to speed up the filling of its management post has ultimately opened Pandora’s box.
The article IGAE, Puertos del Estado and Fundación Puertos de Las Palmas: First Complaint Filed Over Irregularities in Selection of New Manager was first published on canarymaritime.com.
