The Cantabrian sector head Infopuertos uncovered in October 2024 the roadmap of an institutional crisis that the port managers and the Board decided to overlook. With the explicit warning that the entity ‘fell into a black hole after some irregularities were detected a few years ago’, the published reports confirmed that the Fundación Puertos de Las Palmas ‘moves without pain or glory through time and port space.’
The account already anticipated the sector’s mistrust by pointing out that this project ‘will require external hiring for its development’. The final warning was a direct jab at the contracting systems applied in the facility: ‘We expect to see that public call or tender, so that we do not have to think again that where there was always remains, and that the arbitrary finger in the selection of suppliers is still present in what was once an emblematic institution, although it is through legal formulas such as minor contract tenders by invitation‘. And that has a date of October 2024, ‘and is now in very low spirits’, it warned.
The analysis revealed that the institution operated ‘with virtually no activity’ and was ‘pending the route marked by Puertos del Estado’, mired in corporate paralysis that made any standard of public governance unfeasible.
Infopuertos’ audit data confirmed Puertos del Estado’s subsequent thesis that the Port Authority of Las Palmas had been trying for years to get Madrid to validate a contingency plan. The viability of any exit —including privatization demanded by ministerial supervisors— collided with an insurmountable hurdle. As detailed in the 2024 account, ‘everything depends on the Foundation assuming and settling a debt it has with the port authority regarding the transfer of the building.’
The refusal of the governing body members blocked the process, since ‘the trustees consider it dead if someone does not take on that debt, someone other than the Foundation itself.’ This deadlock consolidated a technical blockade that forced the entity to survive on the periphery of the port system ‘with no possibility of resolution until the aforementioned entanglement is resolved.’
The most severe alert issued by the specialized outlet focused on the blatant contradiction that an entity in technical liquidation and ‘with virtually no personnel except its acting manager’ continued to act as a recipient of subsidies. While its dissolution was being deliberated, the Fundación Puertos de Las Palmas broke its inactivity by securing a public program to ‘participate in the development of sustainable fishing tourism routes, in this case in the Port of Las Palmas,’ a project that ended up in the hands of the Astican lobby (Laskadiris), the Maritime Cluster of the Canary Islands. The deployment of this initiative, in collaboration with organizations such as Fundamar or the Fundación Valenciaport, raised alarms among analysts about the transparency of the awarding processes of an entity lacking its own operational capacity.
