Palma awarded Pride to a company that fails all the competition criteria

Without artists, without any experience, without accrediting the suitability of the repertoire from a gender perspective, without a timeline for the duration of each performance, and without any point of information and attention to sexual and LGTBIfobic violence. This is how AgenciaCom won the tender to organize the Palma City Council's Pride festival, as ARA Balears has been able to ascertain in the contract award. Under these conditions, Antoni Martorell's company, the only one to submit a bid, only managed to score 3 out of the 100 points evaluated – in a technical section.

AgenciaCom scored zero points in the following sections: economic offer; carrying out an additional dissemination campaign to that of the poster; linking the artists to the LGTBI+ collective (the City Council says it cannot be known, because the technical report submitted by the company does not name any artist); the suitability of the repertoire from a gender perspective; performance timeline (on this point, Cort says that this lack "makes it difficult to organize [the event] and to know the suitability of each artist according to the schedule"); experience in the field of the festival; the offer of the information point against sexual and LGTBIfobic violence, and the participation of LBT women in the performances. But the shortcomings have not affected the award and this company will be responsible for Pride.

The dissemination of the event began before it was awarded

On the other hand, the dissemination of the Palma City Council's Pride event began before the contract was awarded. The poster and artist campaign for the event started on June 22, but the contract was not awarded until June 23, according to the electronic signature of the document, by the secretary and director of the Governing Board Secretariat, Antoni del Olmo, and the councilor for the Area of Social Services, Education, Citizen Participation, Youth, and Equal Opportunities, Lourdes Roca. Curiously, no technician is responsible for the award, but rather a political appointee, the general coordinator of Social Services, Equal Opportunities, Education, and Youth, Patricia Pizà.

It is also surprising that, despite the deadline for submitting offers ending on the 15th, seven days later, on the 22nd, the artists and presenters of the festival were already being announced (according to the award of June 23rd, they are not included in the report that AgenciaCom presented). The section on the object of the contract states that it includes "the technical artistic production, logistics, as well as the creation and dissemination of the festival's poster". By artistic production, Cort understands "the creation and selection of artistic elements such as artists, scenography, special effects, etc.". In this way, the hiring of artists should have been done before the award date.

Ben Amics announced on Tuesday that it will file a judicial and administrative complaint against Palma City Council for the alleged irregularities surrounding the organization of the LGTBI+ Pride festival. The technical coordinator of Ben Amics, Jan Gómez, explained that the association is working with its lawyer on a complaint that will be filed before the courts of Palma and the municipal contracting board.

A CEO who ridicules the LGTBI+ community

Furthermore, the CEO of AgenciaCom, Antoni Martorell, has ridiculed the LGTBI+ collective in some of his opinion columns. "Today I want to talk to you about pride. And not about that pride that the LGTBI plus and plus plus collectives claim to live in freedom without anyone caring about their sexual life," he wrote on June 20, when his company had already submitted an offer to the Palma City Council to organize the Pride festival.

In another from September 2024, which refers to transsexuality and fluid gender and adopts a more analytical tone, Martorell points out that he is "a bit lost with sex" and speaks of a complicated "equation" for "lifelong cisgenders" compared to trans people. "It's not long before parity shifts towards a gender issue and not a sex issue, where what we have between our legs would matter less and what we are and think would matter more. It's not easy, especially when we talk about fluid gender," he laments regarding equality between men and women.

"Hila la té més grossa" (Hila has it bigger) is the headline he used in July 2023 for another column about the placement of the LGTBI+ flag on the facade of Cort. "We already have Ben Amics and the opposition parties indignant, criticizing that the popular mayor is trapped by Vox," he said about the small flag that was placed with Jaime Martínez as mayor of Palma.

The far-right, satisfied with the censorship of municipal sexual education workshops

Ben Amics has also repeatedly criticized that the Palma City Council censored the sexual and gender diversity workshops it had been offering for 15 years within the PalmaEduca program. But Vox councilwoman Jerónima Mayans showed her satisfaction this Tuesday because they have been eliminated. "We cannot defend these workshops that have been held in previous legislatures. I didn't know them very well, but luckily they have been removed from PalmaEduca's educational offering because they were an aberration, they went against education in general and, in particular, against the affective sexual education of our children," she said at Thursday's plenary session.