Purga y auditoría estatal
They forced her to resign, those gentlemen of the usual circles and of the ’78 Regime. The sudden unraveling of the institutional crisis at the Fundación Puertos de Las Palmas offers a clear lesson on how exclusion works inside the most tightly sealed corporate environments. The latest findings of the state audit, which describe the appointment of manager Betsabé Morales as null and void due to the absence of a public competition, have been received with unmistakable satisfaction by the hard core of La Luz’s employers’ group. They would rather cut off a head than dissolve the entity, because the truth is that, for decades, it has functioned as a front foundation for La Luz’s port employers—used to lobby and block competition in their respective sectors. But asking to dissolve the institution is something only the bold do. In Las Palmas, they prefer a front foundation for foreign interests under the power of intermediaries.
The sudden conversion of port operators to administrative purism does not stem from a genuine desire for democratic renewal, but from the discovery of the perfect legal pretext: using the state’s inflexible rulebook as a tool to eliminate an uncomfortable directive through technical scrutiny—one that is never applied to members of the long-standing club.
Selective application of the rules
The thesis that this is a pure case of administrative discipline collapses when the historical laxity with which the Port of Las Palmas has absorbed, for decades, direct appointments, token presidencies, and political reassignments of an exclusively male stamp is examined. The “dedazo”, a systemic practice across the island consortia that is usually regularized in closed offices with procedural patches or elegant, prearranged exits, becomes a mortal and unfixable sin only when the beneficiary is a woman detached from the traditional ties of employer submission.
The law is applied today with selective surgical rigidity, confirming that the establishment’s true grievance is not the breach of the rule, but Morales’s presence behind the levers of budgetary control. The inquisitorial focus of Puertos del Estado and the complicit silence with Madrid by business federations centers its disproportionate ferocity on the figure of the manager, orchestrating a professional lynching that places her as the sole architect of the accounting chaos. That fixation reflects the classic corporate misogyny that seeks the weakest link in the chain to protect the upper structure.
Direct contracting and the minutes
The proposal for direct hiring came from the president of the Port Authority, Beatriz Calzada, and was unanimously ratified by the entire board of patrons—both public and private. Turning Morales into the exclusive lightning rod for responsibility before the State’s General Intervention allows the signatories of the minutes—almost all of them heavyweight men in island governance—to simulate the role of deceived victims, while avoiding the fact that they consciously validated the procedure.
What unsettles La Luz’s business establishment is not the purity of training contracts, but the loss of submissive interlocution within an entity they considered an appendix of their commercial interests. Once trapped by the legal deadline of 30 June to approve economic statements, their panic about having to respond with their net worth before the Spanish Court of Auditors (Tribunal de Cuentas) has accelerated the order to deliver the manager’s head—an outcome handed down in private lunches long before the auditors put their signatures on paper.
The firewall of a cornered presidency
The systematic de-queuing of extraordinary meetings just hours before they were due to begin depicts the collapse of a defense strategy that has run out of technical room to maneuver. The dismissal—or the induced resignation—of Betsabé Morales is now presented as the mandatory toll that Beatriz Calzada must pay in order to calm the rebellion of the State Bar (Abogacía del Estado). The manager’s sacrifice will function as a firewall for a political presidency that would rather hand over its personal bet than admit the procedural incompetence of its own appointment resolution.
The outcome of the crisis at the Fundación Puertos de Las Palmas confirms the continuing validity of a sexist exclusion code that has managed to recycle itself under the language of financial legality. Morales’s forced exit will not be a victory for public transparency over patronage, but a practical demonstration of how the Port of Las Palmas uses the weight of the state to crush the reputation of a professional—reminding the islands’ female talent of the exact limit of her audacity before the club of gentlemen finally decides to apply, once and for all, the strict weight of the law.
The item “Misogyny in Port Las Palmas: a timid employers’ group uses the state to purge Betsabé Morales from the foundation” was first published on encanarymaritime.com.
