SMEs and self-employed workers in Lanzarote are still waiting to receive the aid announced by the Cabildo last July, and one of those affected wanted to make their complaint public due to this delay. “At first it was in September, then October and now it's November”, they denounce.
In their case, they are registered as self-employed and state that they have not yet been able to recover their activity, which was interrupted by the pandemic. “Every time I call the Cabildo to ask how the process is going, they give me a different date”, they question.
In addition, they recall that the Cabildo's Minister of Finance, Rosa Callero, publicly stated that she expected the money to be deposited “in September” or “at the latest in early October”, a deadline that has already been greatly exceeded.
For her part, the Corporation's Minister of Commerce, Carmen Guadalupe, defends that these procedures “have a process” and that it is very difficult to give dates. However, she points out that they are already “in the final stretch”, after the phase of correcting errors in the applications submitted.
Meanwhile, the worker who wanted to make their complaint public emphasizes the difficulties that those affected are going through. In their case, they even state that they had to ask for help from the Red Cross and the San Bartolomé City Council, where they reside, in order to eat. In addition, they regret that the City Council denied them this aid because it considered that they did not meet all the requirements.
“I am 50 years old, 26 of them contributed, a mortgage to pay, living 30 years in Playa Honda and the City Council denied me the aid. Don't I have the right to have food? Luckily I have family and friends who helped me, because I had a pretty bad time”, they say. They even say that they also went to the Chamber of Commerce to ask for help and a worker started a private collection upon learning of their situation, and they gave them two bags of food.
Now, although they have not been able to resume their previous activity, they have started doing other temporary jobs. However, they insist on the urgency with which they need the aid announced by the Cabildo.
The new estimate, “mid-November”
Regarding the point in which the process is to make the payment effective, the Minister of Commerce points out that this Monday the list of admitted and excluded companies was in Intervention, once the correction process was completed, so that it could issue a report.
After that, the next step is to take it to the Governing Council for approval, and then submit it to public display for ten days. The Minister estimates that the aid could be made effective “in mid-November”, although she insists that it is risky to give specific dates, because there are “procedures that must be followed”.
What she does assure is that the rest of the process is finished, and that “the credit retention of 12 million euros is even signed”.
Regarding what has been delayed, she recalls that they initially tried to announce this aid through an emergency procedure, “shortening the presentation and allegation deadlines by fifteen days, instead of the thirty authorized in the usual procedure”. However, she emphasizes that Intervention warned them that “it was not convenient to do so”, especially due to the period of public display, something that could “put the procedure at risk”.
In addition, she defends the management that has been done to prevent companies and self-employed workers from being left out. “They called person by person, or company by company”, to communicate what document was missing to complete the process, “so that those companies that were excluded could allege in the correction process”, she emphasizes, praising the work carried out by the staff of the Chamber of Commerce and by the workers that the Cabildo also made available to them for the management of this aid.
