The Entity for Transparency, charged with verifying the income statements and incompatibilities of politicians and holders of high public office, remains with no known direction, despite the Constitutional Court (TC) announcing that the management team would be appointed late last year. Questioned by the DN, the TC has not specified what stage this process is in, only that it expects “to be able to give information about the nominations and about the space very soon”.
In November 2022, the TC announced that the plenary of judges had decided “to proceed with the nomination of the management of the entity by the end of the current year”, a deadline that had already passed. According to the law, the direction of the Entity will be for Transparency “composed of three members, a chairman and two members, at least one of whom must be a lawyer”. It is up to the management structure to assemble the human resources necessary for the functioning of the body – which the TC itself already estimates at “dozens of people”.
“This is already bad enough”
Since its inception, the Transparency Entity has been a source of contention between the Assembly of the Republic, which approved its creation in 2019, and the Constitutional Court. The new entity was still being discussed and the TC already warned of the difficulties inherent in the formation of this new organism under its responsibility. In July 2019, hearing within the framework of the parliamentary working group then preparing a package of new measures to increase transparency in the exercise of political and public office, the then Vice-President of the Court (now President), João Caupers, warned: “This is already working poorly enough to run the risk of making it work even worse.” And then he gave an example: to evaluate the 13 statements of the members of the TC, it would have taken “three people for a week”. “Now imagine 13,000 statements,” he warned, referring to the expansion of the universe that the future entity is targeting. Manuel da Costa Andrade, who was then president of the Constitutional, admitted that even then, statements were treated with “great slowness” given the scarcity of resources, arguing that “dozens of people” would be needed to carry out the duties of the new body. However, the situation of “great inertia” did not change: the weekly Expresso reported a few days ago that in nine months of the legislature only one third of the declarations of wealth and income submitted by members of the government and deputies were checked. One of the objectives of the creation of the Entity for Transparency – which had the positive votes of the PS, PSD and BE and the negative vote of the PCP and CDS – was precisely to streamline the control of declarations.
Three years later still no installations
But this was just the first episode. Costa Andrade was due to return to parliament in January 2020 to argue that the amount envisaged in the state budget for that year – €1.1 million – was “insufficient” to cover the cost of creating the new structure, it is estimated by the TC at 1.8 million euros (plus three million euros per year to ensure operation). That was also underlined by the examining magistrate Mariana Canotilho the TC “cannot even launch the international public tenders” necessary for the creation of the new entity: “We don’t have the know how nor the staff to carry out the terms of reference.” Despite the difficulties, Costa Andrade set the horizon for the creation of the entity in the following year: “We believe this could be at cruising speed in 2021, if all goes well.” they didn’t.
Another issue that came up from the start was the physical location of the body, with the TC warning that there was no room in Ratton Palace to install the Entity for Transparency. In addition, the law published in 2019 stipulates that the headquarters of the new body must be located “preferably outside the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto”, therefore, in early 2020, the TC sent identification of a property to house the new body, indicating the cities of Aveiro or Coimbra as preferred locations in early 2020. The process dragged on, with the executive citing difficulties in finding a suitable space, in a process that ended with the choice of Palácio dos Grilos in Coimbra. But the building needed work, which is currently underway, and last November, the TC announced the provisional installation of the Entity for Transparency “in a space to be rented in the city of Coimbra”.
In recent months, the new body has again sparked disagreements between the Assembly of the Republic and the TC, after the Liberal Initiative addressed several questions to Palácio Ratton about the implementation of the new entity. The TC then wrote to AR President Augusto Santos Silva “bewilderment” at the “direct questioning of a parliamentary group before the Constitutional Court, foreign to the requirements of relationships between sovereign bodies”. Already this week, an opinion by Socialist Deputy Alexandra Leitão (approved unanimously) concluded that IL’s request for information was legitimate, but should have been submitted through the president of the interlocutor on this position of the deputies, the TC replied to DN that the “President of the Constitutional Court and the President of the Assembly of the Republic awake, even before the opinion was knownthat questions put to the Court by parliamentary groups are forwarded to the Office of the President of the AR, which forwards them to the Office of the President of the Court.”
Source: DN
