PSD president Luís Montenegro on Monday believed that the prime minister and finance minister should apologize “to the Portuguese” for “injecting more than three billion euros” into TAP.
“Frankly speaking, it is necessary that Dr. Fernando Medina and Dr. António Costa apologize to the Portuguese and take responsibility for injecting more than three billion euros of our money, which is no longer used for other infrastructures, for other investments, in order to nationalize the company that they themselves wanted to. Therefore, for me personally, [a privatização da TAP] I’m not surprised because I never doubted,” the PSD president told journalists today in Guarda, where he is involved in the “Sentir Portugal” initiative, before meeting with the Acreditar movement.
Luís Montenegro reacted to the announcement made in Madrid, Spain, by Finance Minister Fernando Medina about the privatization process of the airline TAP, which will go “soon” to the Council of Ministers.
“I hope to be able to present to the Council of Ministers soon the start of the privatization process of TAP,” said the minister in Madrid at a press conference together with Spain’s Minister of Economy, Nadia Calviño.
Regarding Fernando Medina’s announcement, the PSD leader said that “this should come as a big surprise to the Portuguese”.
Rightly so: “Today we want to pass on a sponge to a reality well known to the Portuguese. In 2016, the airline TAP was in the process of privatization. Most of the capital was already private and the idea was that this process would be developed until the entire capital of TAP goes private”.
‘This socialist team shows its incompetence’
“We had a government, supported by Minister Fernando Medina, then Mayor of Lisbon, led by Doctor António Costa, who is still the same Prime Minister in office today, who wanted to nationalize first part and then all of the capital of TAP. To come to the conclusion almost seven years later that it was, or is better, to privatize TAP’s capital,” he said.
The Social Democratic leader said that, in his opinion, “the future of TAP is private. The future of the Portuguese airline is to be able to be in the market, certainly to fulfill the strategic interests of the country, but to act like a private company”.
“Whoever doubted, who walks with bumps here, who walks here in zigzags, is Dr. António Costa, Dr. Fernando Medina and, by the way, also Dr. Pedro Nuno Santos, who was a minister with special responsibilities in this case, and even Dr. Pedro Marques, who is not allowed to be forgotten, is a member of the European Parliament, and it was the former infrastructure minister who was at the root of that decision,” he said.
And he continued: “In other words, this socialist team shows its incompetence, it shows that it doesn’t know where it wants to go and doesn’t have the humility to take responsibility”.
“Apologies and we can then look at the future of TAP as it should be, and unfortunately lose seven years of our lives and also lose more than three billion euros,” Montenegro concluded.
Source: DN
