The local Governing Board in Torrevieja gave the go-ahead on Friday, March 20th, for the new joint venture Cuida Torrevieja to manage rubbish collection, street cleaning, and beach maintenance in Torrevieja. The company is made up of Acciona and Actúa (Hozono Global Group), each with a 50% share. This agreement means that the Murcia-based company will fully join the city’s primary public contract. They will share the work equally with the global company that won it, and they will start working in June 2026 for a duration of fifteen years.
This service gets €25,784,331 a year from the City Council (including VAT). It can hire up to 400 people at busy times. The total cost of the deal, which has been in place for almost four years, is expected to reach €426 million. This number includes future increases and new collection areas, like the La Hoya macro-plan, which will add €1.4 million a year to the total once the 7,400 homes in the sector are built. It also includes the rest of the areas that will be urbanised in Villa Amalia and La Coronelita, as well as the building of the future La Ceñuela sector with 2,000 homes.
At the beginning of January, the Torrevieja City Council received the agreement that set up the joint venture for approval. The Legal Department and the Contracting Department have been in charge of the file during this time.
The Board of Directors
Federico Alarcón, the secretary of the Popular Party’s Governing Board, announced the deal, which has been approved since it meets the requirements of the Public Sector Contracts Law. These conditions include that the contractor, Acciona, has finished 20% of the original contract in terms of cost or that one-fifth of the contract period has been covered on time, which has already happened in both cases. The assignee, Actúa, must also be fully capable and able to pay its share.
One possible problem with the transfer that happened is that the tender criteria should have made it clear what was going to happen. This transfer mechanism isn’t in the City Council’s specifications, but it’s also not explicitly against the rules. The word “transfer” only comes up once in the 76 pages, and that’s when the original business cancels or returns the guarantee. This means that the formation of a joint venture and the transfer are normally allowed.
Growth
The Hozono Global Group, led by Manuel Martínez Ortuño, is dedicated to providing services and building public infrastructure throughout Spain. It had a turnover of 241 million euros in 2024. This is definitely a chance for them to get into the waste collection business in a big way, working with one of the most international Spanish companies.
Hozono wanted to run this fundamental service in Torrevieja, which has 110,000 residents. They had already submitted a bid for the rubbish collection contract, but their offer was not accepted.
Not meeting expectations
The City Council engaged an outside engineering company to make sure that Acciona followed the terms of its existing contract. This company started work in the summer of 2023, a year after the contract began. The service is much better than it was before because the team has been strengthened and all the machinery has been replaced, but it still doesn’t live up to the expectations it set.
Since then, disciplinary actions and punishments have been taken against people who have broken the contract terms in a major or extremely serious way. However, some of the problems have been fixed over time. Acciona’s legal department is appealing all of these cases in court. The fines are taken out of the bills, and since the punishments started, they have already added up to more than one million euros.
How good the service is
People don’t think very highly of the service that the City Council provides, which isn’t good since they spend a lot of public money on it.
From the user’s point of view, the new joint venture doesn’t really mean a change because it is still subject to the same terms and conditions. The Parks and Gardens contract shows that Grupo Hozono Global has a very different public communication approach than Acciona in Torrevieja.
Controversy
In 2022, the contract was made official in favour of Acciona, which had been in charge of the service since 2004. This came after a long and difficult bidding process that started in 2016 and included many appeals, an attempt to make the service public, and six years of operation without a contract. In 2012, the High Court of Justice of the Valencian Community (TSJCV) found Pedro Hernández Mateo, the mayor at the time and a member of the People’s Party, guilty of corruption. He spent more than two years in prison after it was proven that he had rigged the 2004 contract award in favour of the multinational. The court’s decision did not cancel the administrative process that gave Acciona the service.
Brown bin for organic garbage
The Urban Cleaning Department of the Torrevieja City Council said last Friday that the fifth brown container for collecting organic garbage will be put in place in the next several weeks. This was planned before the firms made this deal. The firm has roughly a thousand new containers at its La Marquesa depot for selected garbage collection.
The GPS tracking gadgets still need to be put in the containers and put together. Now, the hard part will be putting them on the container islands around the city. This will mean getting rid of some of the grey general trash containers. Torrevieja should be able to dump and bury less garbage in authorised landfills if it collects organic waste separately, mostly food scraps from homes. This should also lessen the annual fine it pays for not recycling. Since January 2024, municipalities have had to use this selective collection system. Torrevieja’s tender requirements called for it from the start, almost four years ago. The city makes more than 50,000 tonnes of trash every year.
Supplier
Since 2019, when the People’s Party administration and its ruling team took back control of the city, Hozono Global Group has been the City Council’s principal service and construction supplier. The company and the municipality have a close relationship because they won public tenders for projects like fixing up the Sports Palace, fixing up the pedestrian path in La Mata, building a new sports centre in the same district, fixing up neighbourhood sports courts and maintaining public roads.
This was made stronger by a number of contracts for work on the waterfront, like tearing down the Paseo de La Libertad and making the fairgrounds more accessible, building a footbridge between the Levante breakwater and the new Port leisure centre and fixing up the Ice Factory building, which is currently in progress. The city is putting more than €20 million into these contracts. The process ended with the granting of a €113 million contract for the upkeep of parks and gardens and the creation of additional green spaces. This contract will last for ten years, starting in 2025.
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