The chairman of the TAP Commission of Inquiry, António Lacerda Sales, today found the culture minister’s statements to be a “disrespect” and a “deeply unfair characterization” of deputies’ work, and asked him to retract.
Speaking to the Lusa bureau, the PS deputy also responded to the words of Pedro Adão e Silva in an interview with TSF and Jornal de Notícias, released this Sunday, in which the minister believed that there were deputies acting as “prosecutors of American cinema”. of series B of the 1980s” in the TAP investigative committee.
“This seems to me a lack of respect for the work of the deputies, the committee and parliament itself. I remind you that the government is responding to parliament. No politician is exempt from respecting the institutions, especially parliament, especially the ministers” replied Lacerda Sales.
The chairman of the TAP investigative committee underlined that the deputies have made an “effort of hours and days”.
“More than 187 hours of work, more than 40 auditions, many applications and a lot of documentation. [Foram] many hours of work by the honorable Members, not only in the hearings, but also in the back office to access documentation,” he said.
Lacerda Sales said that as chair of the TAP Commission of Inquiry it is his job to defend the “committee and the parliamentary institution” and said to wait for “the minister to withdraw these statements”.
Lacerda Sales admitted that “everyone has less happy moments” and believed that “this was the case with the Minister of Culture”.
In an interview with TSF and Jornal de Notícias, Pedro Adão e Silva said that there is a “deterioration of the political climate” that is not “independent of things as they happened” in TAP’s parliamentary inquiry committee.
“The transformation from investigations into non-stop nights, not knowing if you were on the phone at 10:00 or 10:05, whether it was before or after, in which deputies are sort of advocates for American B-series cinema of the decade from 80, and then all this is extended into that kind of commentary, like commentary on ‘reality shows’, on news channels at night – if that doesn’t equally contribute to the degradation of images and democracy? My answer is that it is,” he said.
The official noted that “the parliamentary committees of inquiry play a very important role in valuing even parliamentary activity”, but added that “there are behaviors and operational logics” of these committees that “demean the political office”.
“If we think some things are normal, I think we are working on a big mistake,” he insisted.
Source: DN
