The Cabildo de Tenerife once again allocates money to promote a work that does not yet exist. The insular institution has contracted an agency to use the brand of the Spanish Formula 1 driver, Carlos Sainz Junior, to advertise the Motor Circuit brand, a project that will cost more than 50 million public euros and has caused an enormous social response on the island, with environmental and scientific associations calling for the initiative not to be executed.
The expert who advises the Cabildo de Tenerife on the Motor Circuit is the same one who told him that it was not viable
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In this new contract, awarded at the end of August and added to other of 240,750 euros also resolved to publicize the work, the Cabildo de Tenerife has commissioned the company Agency By Sports And Life SL to link the image of Carlos Sainz Junior with the brand “Tenerife Circuito del Motor”, as well as advisory work on promotion and advertising for the entity Insular Management for Sport, Culture and Leisure SA (IDECO), the body that manages this program. The total cost of the award amounts to 401,250 euros.
The procedure used has been negotiated without publicity given the exclusivity of this company, which, according to several resolutions of the Cabildo, is the only one that “has the necessary authorizations” to manage the image of the Ferrari driver.
“In addition, the sporting qualities and professional category of the pilot Mr. Carlos Sainz Vázquez de Castro are relevant to the purpose of the contract,” reads the documentation of the insular institution, “as this body does not have the adequate personal and material means to cover the needs that are sought to be satisfied through contracting.
In the other aforementioned tender, awarded to the company Dorna Sports, the same resource was also used. The administration is now accelerating the contracts related to the Motor Circuit after having presented it with great fanfare last July and having raised eyebrows among some political parties, especially Sí Podemos Tenerife and Nueva Canarias.
However, none of these advertising contracts is new or unexpected. The vice president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Enrique Arriaga (Citizens), the main defender of the work, already spoke at the presentation ceremony of the circuit of both awards. “The contracts with Carlos Sainz or the Dorna group are not large advertising contracts because the return is very important. Simply a tweet from Carlos Sainz that he posted yesterday on the Tenerife circuit reaches four million people, ”said the politician.
Arriaga also confirmed in a plenary commission that the corporation was going to invest 605,000 euros in the promotion of the project. But everything indicates that this amount, which adding the two tenders actually reaches 642,000 euros, will only be this year and does not take into account future contracts. It is expected that the Cabildo de Tenerife will continue to advertise in 2023 and years to come a work of which not a single wall has yet been erected.
