Infrastructure minister Pedro Nuno Santos defended Monday that more is being demanded of the PSD leader “than giving speeches” after Luís Montenegro accused the government of “political and financial crime” at TAP.
“That’s why politicians have to do more than give speeches at rallies, they have to think politically, they have to have experience, they have to assume now what would happen at that moment, and the PSD leader, I never said. Would I have left TAP bankrupt to go or not and what would that mean or not for the country”said Pedro Nuno Santos, who spoke to journalists in Freixo de Espada à Cinta, after being asked for statements from the PSD president.
Speaking over the weekend, at the end of the Coimbra District Municipal Convention, Luís Montenegro believed that what was being done at TAP was “a political and financial crime”, stating that the Prime Minister’s announcement that the privatization of TAP in the next 12 months “cannot go unscathed”.
“This is an important topic for us to also assess the depth of politicians, because the leader of the PSD is needed more if he wants to become prime minister, it takes more than making a few statements”underlined Pedro Nuno Santos.
The minister added that it is necessary to “know the history, the process” and emphasized that “the partial reversal of privatization by the right-wing government has nothing to do with what will be done in 2020”.
“That’s why the intervention carried out in 2020 was at stake to ensure that TAP would not disappear and so that we would not lose the ‘hub’, that was the main objective, it has nothing to do with the reversal of the privatization in 2015,” he insisted.
Asked about the cost to the Portuguese, Pedro Nuno Santos thought it would “cost a lot more for the Portuguese, for Portugal, for the Portuguese economy to drop TAP and that’s the point”.
“Without a ‘hub’ we would lose billions of euros. Portugal has a peripheral position in the European framework and that is a disadvantage, but it also has a central role in the relationship with the Atlantic Ocean, which is an advantage and to benefit from this advantage we should have a ‘hub’ in the Iberian Peninsula that can compete with another ‘hub’ in Madrid”he emphasized.
And he continued: “If we want to lose all the assets that are sources of business in Portugal, well, this is a sign that the country is giving up and we are not giving up on the country”.
And to the question of journalists about possible stakeholders in the privatization of TAP, the minister replied: – “How, how much and when we are not yet at that moment”.
“Right now there is a strategic option that does not contradict, because we did not intervene with TAP so that it would be 100% public, we intervened with TAP so that it did not disappear. We are at a very early stage of This There is a strategic option, we will give it time and if there is news on the subject, we will give it,” emphasized Pedro Nuno Santos.
Source: DN
