SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 4 Jan. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The spokesperson for Unidas Podemos in the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council, Ramón Trujillo, has affirmed that the stoppage of the Rodin Museum is “a success of the world of culture, which has dismantled the unreasonableness, disguised as reasons, with which the mayor Bermúdez was going to waste 16 million euros of public money”.
Ramón Trujillo has warned in a statement that it is yet to be clarified whether the mayor asked the Rodin Museum in Paris to withdraw from the project on his own initiative, adding that it is clear that the Parisian institution “was not interested in appearing linked to an opaque process, repudiated by the cultural sector and with doubts about the hidden motivations that were published in national media”.
Trujillo has indicated that he was confident that he would have paralyzed the award of the purchase of copies of Rodin’s works with the appeal that United We Can plan to present next week before the Administrative Court of Public Contracts of the Canary Islands.
The spokesman denounced that the purchase of works “was based on an appraisal lacking the required impartiality and, likewise, the economic feasibility project was not at all credible and had been entrusted to three companies, selected by the City Council, who share managers”.
Ramón Trujillo stressed that the project was “legally questionable” and that Bermúdez and the Rodin Museum in Paris “could not afford an imminent legal setback that would add to the opposition of the cultural sector, the growing citizen rejection that the project was arousing and the national ridicule that meant going out in the state media portrayed as provincials who had put a culturet saber in Paris”.
On the other hand, Trujillo has announced that he will address a letter to the French ambassador in Spain arguing that “it is not acceptable that an institution dependent on the French Ministry of Culture, the Rodin Museum in Paris, try to sell copies of sculptures to a city council of our country motivated by an excessive desire for profit that leads it to rely on appraisals that are far from the required impartiality and on the opaque behavior of the local administration in Santa Cruz de Tenerife”.
According to Ramón Trujillo, “bad practices include the bidding for an economic impact study that exaggerates the economic impacts that the Rodin museum would have had in Santa Cruz, something that has the effect of encouraging the irresponsible spending of public money. It is, obviously, , of a procedure improper of a public institution”.
Trujillo considers that it is important to determine how and through whom the proposal for a Rodin Museum for Tenerife came about. “The national press has pointed out the director of a consulting company, with close ties to Ciudadanos in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, for his presence in Paris and in the City Hall in negotiations regarding the Rodin Museum, despite not having been hired for that purpose. It is worth asking if these media clues contributed to aborting the Rodin museum project and, if so, what are the exact reasons,” questioned the spokesman for United We Can.
Finally, Ramón Trujillo wanted to recall that a year ago his political formation was the first to seriously object to the museum proposal. In January 2022, the spokesperson sent a statement to the media warning of serious inconsistencies in the Rodin Museum’s economic impact study and other related issues. “That was the moment to open the plural debate on the issue, but there was no will to do so,” laments the spokesman.
