In the controversial Governing Board of March 25 in which Llorenç Cordoba raised his voice and I say blows on the table, an episode that was for weeks the epicenter of political debate in Formentera, the interim comptroller Pablo Serra Serra used arguments contrary to the tender specifications under suspicion to overturn the report of Human Resources with which the president of the Consell de Formentera wanted to declare deserted the lots of the beach bars then pending to be awarded. The councilors of Sa Unió, Verónica Castelló, Cristina Costa Juan and Óscar Portas, voted against declaring the tender void that day. Finally,the technician was challenged by the best-scored beach bars thanks to the changes in criteria introduced by the Contracting Committee and that otherwise would not have won, except in one of the eight lots, Cordoba was removed from the procedure and the councilors of Sa Unió ended up awarding the lots . In the aforementioned Governing Board, convened in an extraordinary and urgent way for this point after Sa Unió had stopped its debate in the ordinary meeting of the previous week, there was a relevant fact that until now had gone unnoticed and that adds to the trail of irregularities accumulated by the contest under suspicion of beach services. Thus, according to La Voz de Ibiza, the comptroller took out of his sleeve during the debate an argument contrary to the specifications of the tender to discredit the report of the Human Resources lawyer who concluded that all bids failed to comply with the specifications in the field of labor. He argued that he could not accept the aforementioned report because, among other things, it had not contemplated the possibility of the successful bidders outsourcing certain services to third party companies, which would allow them to comply with the terms of the bidding conditions. Despite the fact that this statement was false because the bidding specifications expressly prohibit this practice, no one present raised any objection.
The specifications and the report
As can be read in several sections of the administrative clauses of the tender, subcontracting of services is not allowed. In Article 24.3 paragraph a, it is determined as one of the “essential contractual obligations” “the non-subcontracting of the service”. And in 28, “neither the transfer of the authorization nor its subcontracting is allowed”. Reference is also made to the prohibition in the technical conditions. In Article 5.2.3: “The holder of the authorization/concession may not, under any circumstances, assign, subrogate, sublet or subcontract or transfer to third parties the lots or facilities awarded”. The same specifications demand a range in the hours that the beach premises should be open: from 9 am to 6 pm for three months and from 9 am to 8 pm for four months, which implies 63 and 77 hours of work per week respectively. “To these two periods must be added one hour before 9:00 in the morning and one hour after closing for maintenance work, cleaning and reloading of machines, mandatory to perform this task outside service hours,” says a report of Legal Services of the Consell of March 21 this year. According to its author’s calculation, this implies a total of 77 hours in low season and 91 hours in high season, so there should be 15 and 20 workers respectively to cover the entire schedule. This report was the main argument of the president of the Consell to propose (unsuccessfully), in the Governing Board of March 25, that the contest be declared void, since the staff proposed in the bids by the contestants was far from the minimum 15 workers required. During that government meeting, the auditor dismissed the legal report: he described it as “incomplete”, because “it does not contemplate that the labor legislation, which does not detail, allows another distribution of schedules for workers; and the schedules that are indicated to be breached are contrary to the possibility of subcontracting, such as kitchen services“.
Silence of the secretary
Despite the fact that the auditor’s main argument for concluding that the lawyer’s report was “incomplete” was contrary to the bidding rules, the Secretary of the Consell, Ángel Custodio Navarro, remained silent at all times.
No one warned that the option of complying with labor legislation with the personnel provided and complying with the opening hours of the specifications via outsourcing of services was not possible. This issue went completely unnoticed in the tense session.
Before or after
The underlying debate and that raised the well-known confrontation between Cordoba and the secretary was whether this issue should be addressed at this time and was sufficient to declare the contest void or should be postponed to the executive phase. That is, it had to be awarded and once awarded to assess whether the beach bars complied. The session began with the tension in the clouds by a meeting convened behind the back of the president by Sa Unió with the technicians of the Environment, the secretary, the auditor and the president of the Contracting Committee. It also generated controversy the request of the councilors of Sa Unió that the author of the report that endorsed that the contest was declared deserted appeared. Córdoba refused. During the debate, Sa Unió denigrated the work of the Human Resources technician, of whom it said “we do not trust”. At the request of Sa Unió, the secretary argued that no one had challenged the bases and argued that this issue should in any case be settled in the executive phase, i.e., with the contracts awarded, not before that. To this end, he read an article in a biased way, as he deliberately omitted the second part of it. It was the president who urged him to read the part of Article 201 of the Public Sector Contracts Act that facilitates “the contracting authorities to take appropriate measures to check during the tendering procedure that the candidates and bidders comply with the obligations”, which supported the president’s thesis. This is the moment when the president’s angry reaction took place. Subsequently, the intervention of the financial controller took place.
Reckless bids
The auditor then puts on the table the option of declaring the bids to be reckless before declaring it void. He dismisses this option with the puerile argument that “it would not lead to a bidding process this summer”. Another surprising argument is the one used by the secretary to consider that the bids “are very real”: “The Contracting Committee has worked hard and has not valued anything of what is now being said”.
Calculations
Also controversial is the authorship of the calculations of the personnel needed to fulfill the contract included in the report of the Human Resources lawyer. “Neither I nor the secretary made them,” says the comptroller, implying that only the two of them would be authorized to take them into account.
Gross irregularities
In addition to the lack of personnel, during the last season it became evident that many beach bars do not have the legally required qualified lifeguards. This has been denounced by the former concessionaires of the kiosks of Formentera and admitted by the Consell. It is not the only fault investigated by the Consell: it has also been noted faults in the requirement to provide beverage service throughout the beach and have been noticed unpermitted facilities, such as a pipe buried under the dunes in es Migjorn.
