Former CCB president Francisca Carneiro Fernandes claims to have found “very wrong management practices” at the CCB and believes that the reason for her dismissal was her “rigor”, which “disturbed long-established interests”.
In an interview with the daily “Público”, Francisca Carneiro Fernandes, who was fired from her position as president of the board of directors of the Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém (entity that manages the CCB) on November 29, two days before completing one year of mandate, says he found “serious practices” and was unaware of the Minister of Culture’s ideas for the CCB, as he “never received guidance” on the future of the institution.
“I have no idea what ideas Professor Dalila (Rodrigues) might have for the CCB, I’ve never heard. Nor for the culture sector in general. We had two meetings (…). They were the only contacts. I never received any guidance for the CCB”, he said, in the interview with Pública.
The controversial dismissal of Francisca Carneiro Fernandes took on an even greater dimension when Dalila Rodrigues accused, in a parliamentary hearing, the former minister of an “assault on power” in the CCB and of “cronies, ‘lobbies’ and wedges that led to the creation of (that) team of the CCB”, accusing Francisca Carneiro Fernandes, not only of colluding, but also of failing to comply with guidelines.
Since then, the case has been all over the newspapers and social media, with fierce defenses on each side, and with the certainty that many of the protagonists of the case, including Francisca Carneiro Fernandes and former minister Pedro Adão e Silva, will for parliament to provide clarifications to the various parties.
In what is her first interview since leaving the CCB, the exonerated president talks about “very wrong and worrying” practices, which she tried “until the end” to correct, despite having felt “a lot of resistance”.
Among the practices it denounces are excluded hiring, poorly justified direct adjustments for the acquisition of material and poorly constructed specifications, a situation that Francisca Carneiro Fernandes classifies as “a disgrace”.
“Another area with major irregularities is property management – here, the CCB is in a calamitous state. Elevators, for example, are stopping, and suppliers have clear links to the people who chose them through direct adjustments worth hundreds of thousands of euros. And the situation in the financial area is also serious”, accuses the former president of the CCB.
Still on what she considers bad practices, the person in charge says that the CCB, which needs urgent investment and should have an acquisition fund for works of art, “currently has 17 million euros in financial investments, of which only four million are in balance.”
“Three years ago, there was a significant loss in investments, more than a million euros of devaluation”, he adds, admitting however that he did not inform the guardianship of this situation, justifying himself with the “almost non-existent” contact he had with the minister.
Francisca Carneiro Fernandes also denounces that the previous administration left almost 4.5 million euros unexecuted in 2023, in a budget that varies between 17 and 20 million.
Referring to the minister’s accusation that her remuneration policy put the CCB’s sustainability at risk, Francisca Carneiro Fernandes considers it “shocking that the difference between salary increases and salary adjustments is not perceived”.
“Public companies normally update their salary table to the inflation rate that the government sets every year. At CCB, this update had not been done since 2009”, he says, adding that the update he proposed in December 2023 was already included in the activity plan for 2024 of the previous administration, in a salary table frozen 15 years ago.
Lusa tried to contact the Ministry of Culture, but so far without success.
Source: rr.sapo.pt
