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La Voz Canaria

Emergency Cleaning Contract in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Goes to Court

A company challenges the direct award of the cleaning service, alleging potential harm to public finances due to lack of competition.

Generic image of a judge's gavel on a desk in a courtroom.
IA

Generic image of a judge's gavel on a desk in a courtroom.

The emergency cleaning contract in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, awarded to FCC last October, has been legally challenged by a company alleging irregularities in the process.

The agreement for the emergency award of the solid waste collection and street cleaning service in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has become the subject of a legal dispute. An anonymous company filed a lawsuit on March 31 at the Plaza del Tribunal de Instancia de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, within the Contentious-Administrative section.
The lawsuit questions the procedure used by the City Council for the direct award of the service, arguing that the necessary conditions for emergency contracting were not met. The City Council had justified this measure due to increased staff unavailability (reaching 40% in Collection and 50% in Street Cleaning), a rise in waste, and the age of the vehicle fleet.
However, the plaintiff contends that the accumulation of dirt in the streets was a direct consequence of the City Council's inability to award the street cleaning and solid waste collection contracts, which had been nullified since 2019, and to manage service weaknesses such as absenteeism or obsolete machinery.
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"By directly awarding the services intended to address the emergency's underlying causes to a single economic operator, without any competitive bidding and thus preventing the attainment of more economically advantageous prices through market competition, municipal finances may have been harmed by potential service overcharges."

the lawsuit
From the plaintiff's perspective, the direct selection of FCC, at a cost of nearly two million euros per month, violates the principles of equal treatment, non-discrimination, and transparency that should govern public procurement. It is argued that this practice could have caused damage to municipal finances by failing to seek the best market offer.
The lawsuit also points out that the public health problems cited by the City Council are a result of administrative negligence. Furthermore, it recalls that the European Commission recommends the negotiated procedure for reasons of imperative urgency, an option that the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria City Council allegedly disregarded. Spanish legislation links emergency processing to catastrophic events or situations of grave danger, not to administrative neglect.

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