The first bluff from the dock of perjury at the Fundación Puerto de Las Palmas: the Macapel project with Mauritania
The Macapel project survives in customs records as the promise of €167 million that managed to do little more than issue press releases. Few analysts of maritime transport and corporate diplomacy in the Mid-Atlantic recall such a singular episode in the history of Puerto de Las Palmas—and, throughout this network, the Fundación Puerto de Las Palmas has come to function like a kind of parallel ICEX.
Calling Betsabé Morales, the manager of the Fundación Puertos de Las Palmas, a solution to an institutional trust crisis is absurd. The problem is older, and many of the protagonists of this story continue to be involved with the Fundación Puerto de Las Palmas.
The roots of the MACAPEL platform reach back to a remote past, revealing a trail of institutional announcements that began taking shape in late 2013 under the grand headline that the Port of La Luz would immediately recover its historical profile as a major international fishing hub. Today, the account of these intentions—led by the tireless Bernardino Santana—appears in governance manuals for ports in the Canaries as the perfect example of a logistics bluff: a lot of literature on bilateral cooperation, costly trips for institutional representation, and zero meters of reinforced-concrete wharfing at Nuadibú.
The documentary archaeology of this virtual infrastructure places its first major act of faith in November 2013, during a meeting in Brussels described by the Canary delegation to senior EU officials Roberto Cesari and Constantinou Papaconstantinou as “very fruitful and clarifying.” The meeting—designed to secure political promises before the signing of the fishing protocol between the European Union and Mauritania—brought together the archipelago’s entire corporate and mid-market fabric that, at the time, was right in the middle of the fishing business.
The official delegation that traveled to the Belgian capital to sell the project plans included Bernardino Santana in his capacity as president of the ports commission of the Confederación Canaria de Empresarios; Miguel Rodríguez, coordinator of the Las Palmas port stevedores; José Socas, first vice president of Fedeport (today its president); Bellahi Brahim Vall, president of Mauritanian companies and of the Macapel Partnership itself; José Miguel Luengo and Álvaro González, executives from the Canary Islands’ Government office in Brussels; María Dolores Rodríguez Mejías, technical adviser to the consortium; Mario Ruano, the engineer tasked with designing the African floating infrastructure; and María José Castellano, delegate of the public company Proexca.
The wharf of €167 million and 5,000 virtual placements
Despite the backing of such a large lineup of business and technical representatives who promised to safeguard the status of the Canaries as a particularly sensitive outermost region, the commercial proposal put forward by Macapel stalled in what became a repeated pattern of inflated macroeconomic figures. In the autumn of 2015, two years after the first promises were made in European offices, the consortium raised the stakes by announcing €57 million in public investment to build a 1,200-linear-meter mooring front attached to an industrial refrigerator with a static capacity of 60,000 tonnes. The project promised to operate simultaneously four pelagic landing vessels and four loading vessels, theoretically mobilizing 700,000 tonnes of frozen fish per year and incorporating a supposed €110 million private capital contribution that would automatically generate more than 5,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs along Mauritania’s coast.
The need to give consistency to the financial narrative forced the group to begin an intensive tour in December 2016 under the slogan of raising European and state funds that would genuinely cover the requirements imposed by Nuakchot. Grouped under the grandly named commercial platform ‘Canarias ¡Existe!’, the island delegation organized a new cross-border trip coordinated again by María José Castellano from Proexca. In the halls of the Spanish Representation to the European Union (Reper) and the Ofecome in Brussels, Miguel Rodríguez appeared as president of the right-leaning central of Trabajadores Portuarios (stevedores); José Juan Ramos carrying the insignia of president of Fedeport; Bernardino Santana acting as Macapel’s spokesperson; María Dolores Rodríguez as technical adviser; and Álvaro González from the Government Delegation.
The delegation attempted to persuade the Reper chief adviser for Commerce, Juan Francisco Martínez, the head of Multilateral Funding, María Lacasa, and the RUP adviser, Carlos Portugués, to continue in Brussels, on the urgency of financing a “exchange of synergies”: ensuring pelagic fish landings in Gran Canaria in return for pushing forward the free zone of Nuadibú. To complete the institutional choreography, the platform delivered to the tireless Roberto Cesari a letter of political support signed by the then Mauritanian minister of Economy, Ould Djay, before flying to the Netherlands to tell the same “advances” to operators in Northern Europe.
Trips to Brussels to keep the chimera alive
The persistence of the project’s promoters showed a formidable resistance to discouragement, changing acronyms and representations as the years went by without a single stone being moved along the African coastline. In September 2018, five years after the initial 2013 summit, the regional maritime transport committee repackaged its files and returned to the European Parliament in Brussels. In this new rhetorical offensive, Bernardino Santana appeared wearing the insignia of vice president of Fedeport to again claim the alleged benefits of the terminal before euro MPs, insisting on the virtues of a specialized international partnership for handling fishing products which, in practical terms for actual stevedoring and chartering, remained mired in total operational paralysis.
The reality of the long-distance fleet and the logistics companies in the region has followed a radically different path from the institutional speeches of Fedeport and Proexca. While press releases took for granted the acquisition of EU funding and the mixed meetings were filed in the European parliamentary records, the major industrial fishing corporations opted to keep their traditional customs routes or redirect their landings to ports with tangible, real infrastructure—away from the rhetoric on work safety and health put forward by island consultancies. The ambitious wharf designed by engineer Mario Ruano and backed by executives from industry associations was reduced to a faded infographic in the fishing trade archives of the previous decade.
The continued failure of the MACAPEL platform illustrates the exhaustion of a port management model that systematically confuses the signing of cooperation agreements with the actual balances of goods on the wharf. In the Mid-Atlantic, the bunker market, freezing and maritime supply reward physical investment and operational cold-storage capacity, undermining the viability of corporations that base their commercial survival on the exploitation of theoretical regulatory advantages. The 700,000 tonnes of frozen fish per year that the 2013 delegation intended to channel through its phantom infrastructure continues to be distributed through the ordinary channels of the international fleet, confirming that the only real and simultaneous landing the partnership has carried out over these thirteen years has been that of press-paper tonnes.
Entry: The first bluff from the dock of perjury at the Fundación Puerto de Las Palmas: the Macapel project with Mauritania was first published on encanarymaritime.com.
