The Court of Auditors said this Wednesday in parliament that the audit report on Efacec, which should include the costs for the State, will be released in the coming weeks.
In the parliamentary committee on economics, where the audit of the privatization of ANA – Aeroportos de Portugal is being heard, the president of the Court of Auditors, José Tavares, made a point of clarifying in his opening speech that what was recently published in the media about the Court of Auditors’ assessment of Efacec was not the audit report, but the “report (of the auditors) for the sake of contradiction”.
As he explained, this is a phase of the audit process in which the auditors’ report is sent to various entities for them to comment and it was then that “someone improperly disclosed” this document to the media.
The audit report with the final conclusions must be approved by the advisory judges, he said, adding that this “will happen in 15 days or a month, at the moment it doesn’t happen”.
Observador reported at the beginning of September that the audit underway at the Court of Auditors – requested by the Assembly of the Republic when the company, which had since been sold (by the PS Government) to the German company Mutuares, was still owned by the State – indicates that public financial support for Efacec could exceed 500 million euros and that, although the State could still recover a large part of it, for now the nationalisation has failed to achieve its objectives.
According to the preliminary documentation of the audit, which Observador says has already passed the adversarial phase, public financing of 484 million euros was quantified until privatization, completed in October 2023, but this could still increase by 80 million and reach 564 million euros, due to the contingent liabilities assumed by Parpública in the sale to Mutares.
Source: www.jornaldenegocios.pt
