A slaughterhouse for divers. The Port of Las Palmas is home to an overwhelming majority of companies, shipping agents and operators that invest fortunes in safety, strictly comply with regulations and pay the true cost of protecting their workers. That is why it is so bitter to see the indifference with which the Labour Inspectorate watched a handful of pirates pull off their scheme. While serious businesses in the port face suffocating scrutiny, Otech Marine Services and its partners in the Laskaridis Group, linked to Asepeyo, only had to resort to a cost-cutting ruse to leave a 23-year-old diver severely disabled under the passive gaze of the competent authority. The Greek company’s defence is: «These things happen.» True—on concession land belonging to the Kingdom of Spain.
Administrative stench
The Port of Las Palmas is an ideal setting for administrative indifference. Amid the stench of heavy fuel and the ashen light of La Luz, Labour inspectors quickly understand that life is merely a bureaucratic formality of files to archive and pages to stamp. Workplace accidents are nothing more than an acceptable metric on an Excel spreadsheet; and under that logic, Lewis Beddows’ collapse at the age of 23 is almost poetic in its statistical irrelevance. A shattered body with irreversible neurological damage does not alter the office’s closing time or ruffle the inspecting authority.
At 23
The mechanism behind the tragedy was reassuringly mediocre for any unscrupulous bureaucrat. A vessel represented by Hamilton (Transcoma), repaired at the Laskaridis Group’s shipyards and operated through Otech Marine Services’ subcontracting arrangement on the Ocean Great White platform. Everything was in place for negligence to proceed without disrupting routine inspections. The young man’s father, Derek Beddows—an international auditor with long experience at corporations such as BP and Technip—exposed the true nature of this impune botched job in August 2026, carried out in December 2018.
A cost-cutting measure the Inspectorate let slide
The accident resulted from a chain of incompetence that any labour inspector with a minimum of apathy could have signed off with a blind eye. There was a hyperbaric chamber on the quay, but it was rendered useless because «the supervisor did not know how to use it; if he had known how to properly manage basic air dives, it would not have been necessary, but he could not even do that!» Meanwhile, the chamber at the port facilities was not operational because Otech’s project manager preferred to cut costs by failing to notify the start of the dive and dispensing with the local doctor «because he believed the worst-case scenario would never happen». A textbook fraud that the Las Palmas Labour Inspectorate swallowed without asking uncomfortable questions.
The emergency protocol was a paper farce: «a totally defective response plan that could never have worked». It took six hours for recompression to arrive after the decompression accident. «The result? A 23-year-old diver with everything to look forward to—training ahead, an exciting and promising career—all lost, gone, and with neurological challenges for the rest of his life.» After «a week in hospital, countless chamber treatments and experiences that were far too dark», the young man was left unable to continue.
The joke of the quality seal and Greek cynicism
For the Labour Inspectorate, the incident was the perfect routine matter: filed away as a marginal mishap involving itinerant labour. Derek Beddows attacks «those rogue contractors hiding behind their IMCA certificate, which is just a coloured A4 piece of paper in a nice frame on the wall of the boardroom». But the final touch to this monument to impunity came from the Greek company itself, which dismissed the father with the cold condescension of an email written in corporate English: «We are sorry to hear what happened to your son (…), but unfortunately, things like this continue to happen everywhere… even if we were not involved (sic) in this area of the project.» The company’s website states that they handled it themselves.
A simple «these things happen» was enough to close the file on a mutilated young man in Canary waters. In Las Palmas, inspectors looked the other way while the pirates cut costs and laughed in the face of the law. There was no accident: there was complacency, corporate arrogance and a Labour Inspectorate that chose the easy administrative route rather than proving who is in charge at the Port of Las Palmas.
The article That Labour Inspectorate: Laskaridis’ Farce That Shames the Port of Las Palmas was first published on canarymaritime.com.
