PALMA
REGIONAL Minister for Tourism, Joana Barcelo, said yesterday that she is shortly to reshuffle the public companies run by her department in order to tighten financial controls and stamp out corruption.
Following a meeting of the Balearic government and responding to questions on the Voltor corruption scandal, allegedly involving the Institute for Tourist Strategy (Inestur) and ex Tourism ministers from the Majorcan Unionist (UM) Party, Barcelo said that the case was the trigger for ejecting the UM from the ruling Balearic government coalition.
The Minister said that with the current Balearic government itself now implicated in the Voltor case for possible misappropriation of public funds, changes in how the Tourism ministry's public companies were run would help reassure the public about the government's integrity.
In order to crack down on irregularities, said Barcelo, the government wants to introduce a law which will make management of public funds more straight forward and less prone to malpractice.
Another measure, said Barcelo, will be to set up legal and financial auditing in public companies, a process which is already applied to regional government administration.
With the same end in mind, Barcelo is proposing merging the two public companies which currently serve the Tourism ministry, both of which are involved in the promotion and marketing of tourism of the Balearics. Barcelo claimed that through the merger, she will be able to manage a much smaller and efficient public company which is able to respond more rapidly to the increasingly diverse demands of tourism.
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