The civic movement “Don’t Cover Your Eyes” launched three appeals this Tuesday, following the report conclusion of the General Inspectorate of Finance on the company: asks the Public Prosecutor’s Office to reopen the investigation process that was archived in 2020, and the President of the Republic to summon the Prime Minister to ensure that the Minister of Infrastructure “does not continue to represent the Portuguese State” in the privatization process and that, if it goes ahead, it has “total transparency”.
In reaction to the document the Government received last week and sent in the meantime to the Public Prosecutor’s Officethe movement reiterates in a statement “everything it has defended since 2014”, when it emerged with director António-Pedro Vasconcelos as its mentor, in the face of the beginning of the “ruinous operation of privatizing TAP”. The group considers that the report “confirms all the accusations” it has been making.
“Private management was disastrous and the decision to privatize allowed private shareholders to acquire the company, destroying its value and, through public guarantees granted by the government and Parpública in 2015, eliminating any risk for the private investor,” the note reads.
The movement argues that, if it is confirmed that “previous members of the government that privatized TAP knew about and validated unfair and surreptitious commercial strategies on the part of the investors who acquired it”, it is necessary for Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa to “demand immediate explanations” from Luís Montenegro “regarding the continuation in office of this(these) member(s) of the current government”.
Horacio Villalobos
“Não TAP os Olhos” also highlights that it has been “proven” that TAP “is a profitable company, when well managed, and that the largest commercial civil aviation groups want to acquire it”. “The Portuguese State cannot do without an annual profit of 173 million euros (with a tendency to increase) which represents, in a single year, what we would earn from the sale of 19.9% to Lufthansa”, it highlights.
The report by the Inspectorate-General of Finance concludes that TAP was bought with the company’s own money. The Minister of Infrastructure and Housing, Miguel Pinto Luz, who at the time of the privatization in 2015 was Secretary of State for Infrastructure, Transport and Communications in the government of Pedro Passos Coelho, said on Tuesday that the process “was one of the most scrutinized in Portuguese democracy”, ensuring that “there is nothing to hide”.
Source: expresso.pt
