António Costa received a lot of support this Wednesday in the dispute against the former governor of Banco de Portugal, Carlos Costa, over the alleged interference in the sense of keeping Isabel dos Santos in the board of BIC. The President of the Republic defended the Prime Minister by considering that the Portuguese authorities acted in the name of the national interest in the case involving the former President of Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos.
“It was a story that went well, in the sense that the national interest dictated that it go this way,” said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, when asked by journalists about the CEO’s performance regarding the Angolan businesswoman’s affairs in Portugal Isabel dos Santos.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa pointed to “the weight” that “sacrificed” the interests of Isabel dos Santos and made diplomatic relations with Angola “very bad” during the rest of the term of office of the then Angolan president, José Eduardo dos Santos, father of the business woman.
“On the part of all those who intervened, on the official side, none of the interveners ever thought that there would be a solution if the female engineer [Isabel dos Santos] persisted in not accepting the agreement, not applying the law, which was unfavorable to him,” he underlined.
On the same day Costa reiterated that he would sue the former governor of Banco de Portugal over the statements – which are part of the book written by journalist Luís Rosa – which the prime minister says are “lies” and “misrepresentations” about him , and in which he accuses Carlos Costa of setting up a political operation to attack his character, he also received the support of the president of the PS.
Carlos César rejected the alleged pressure mentioned in the book O Governador on Tuesday and repeated aloud by Carlos Costa during the presentation in Gulbenkian.
Carlos César defended that it was António Costa who “liberated” BPI from Isabel dos Santos, blaming the Banif process on the Passos manager. In a Facebook post, the socialist leader and state councilor said the former governor was “disrespectful” and that “there is too much resentment and too little sense of state” for leaving office “without much credit”.
“António Costa wanted to protect Isabel dos Santos? But wasn’t it António Costa’s government that passed a decree law that allowed BPI to get rid of Isabel dos Santos? It was,” he concludes.
For the PS president, “the political pressure expressed at the time and apparently successful was what led Carlos Costa to prevent the appointment of Mário Centeno as Director of the Studies Bureau of the Banco de Portugal”.
In the banking industry, the “devaluation” of this controversy and the contents of the book prevailed. Some heads of financial institutions argue that they will not read the work and others that the most important thing is how resistant it is to pressure.
The position of the heads of some of the most important Portuguese banks was announced this Wednesday during a panel at the conference “The banking of the future”, organized by Jornal de Negócios, in Lisbon.
Tableware belies book
“It’s a lie,” also says the former leader of the Bloco de Esquerda Francisco Louçã about statements made by the former governor of the BdP about his participation in a working group set up by the Ministry of Finance.
Also on Facebook, Louçã says: “For now I’m going to thank you for the reference you made to me, but it’s a lie. He says on page 377, as proof of the pressure he would have been subjected to, that “the issue reached the point of the Ministry of Finance to create a working group on the issue of public finances, to which Francisco Louçã was invited “to deal with bank dividends and debt management and its maturities”. And then he regrets that what is stated in the publication is “untrue”, since he says: “I do not know of any working group set up by the Ministry of Finance in this area and do not participate in it”, but that he participated , i.e. to a group set up by the PS Agreement and BE that has presented a report in parliament on sovereign debt scenarios”.
With Lusa
Source: DN
