The appointment of the former general manager of National Defense Resources, Alberto Coelho, as chairman of the board of directors of ETI – EMPORDEF – Tecnologias de Informação, SA, a state-owned defense industry company, while he had already been held responsible for several ” non-compliance legal” in hiring staff for the rehabilitation work of the former Military Hospital of Belém (HMB), was the main subject of questions from opposition deputies to the former defense minister and current foreign minister.
João Gomes Cravinho heard in parliament this Wednesday and for the first time accepted the “mistake” of that decision, but his explanation still raised doubts. “If I had known what I know now, I would not have made this nomination,” he assured. The former minister acknowledged that he overestimated the curriculum of the former director-general, who is currently accused in a corruption investigation involving the HMB contract.
“I overestimated the 19 years of Director General, I overestimated what Dr. Alberto Coelho’s entire curriculum had been, (…) ),” said João Gomes Cravinho. “There were no elements that could make us think in bad faith and so the appointment to the ETI followed its course. Was it a mistake? Of course it was a mistake,” he added.
However, when he decided on this appointment on April 29, 2021, in addition to the IGDN audit that pointed to various illegalities in Alberto Coelho’s procedures – for which he was eventually fined €15,300 by the Court of Auditors – there was already more over a year long history of warnings about the cost of work slipping off the rails. The first warnings came from the then Secretary of State for Defense, Jorge Seguro Sanches, who proposed the audit of the IGDN. But despite the fact that the Secretary of State had the HMB file in the ministry and he was the first to suspect the Director General, Cravinho decided not to inform him of Coelho’s controversial appointment to ETI.
Pointing out that he talked to Seguro Sanches about “matters within his competence” and others that “were not within his competence (…) coincidentally we did not talk (about the appointment of Alberto Coelho)”. Deputy Jorge Paulo Oliveira, from the PSD, questioned why he “hid” this nomination from the then Secretary of State and whether he was afraid he would reject it. Cravinho responded by exclaiming that it was “almost comical the attempt to find a difference” between himself and Seguro Sanches, with whom he “always worked closely”.
The former defense minister also confirmed that he had arranged this appointment with the then president of IdD-Portugal Defense – the defense industry holding company into which ETI was integrated – the current Secretary of State for Defense, Marco Capitão Ferreira. “I had a regular conversation with the president of IdD and this question came up,” he said. Captain Ferreira saw no obstacles either.
Another situation where Cravinho slipped into the clarifications involved the moment he learned about the cost over estimate.
Firstly, the former Minister of Defense believed that the amounts in an email from the Directorate-General for National Defense Resources (DGRDN) dated March 27, 2020, which quickly estimated an additional 900 thousand euros at work due to “work additions” requested by the army, were “acceptable”.
At a second moment, however, a new e-mail dated April 20 brought the extra costs to 2.5 million euros to the planned 750 thousand euros. But Cravinho claimed that this document did not reach him until June 23, “because it exceeded the maximum message size and was rejected by the server”.
However, he did not mention the news that had already come out on that date, pointed to the derailment, namely in the DN, and did not even explain why all contracts – worth a total of 3.2 million euros – were made public platform base.gov since April 23, 2020, I was not aware of these values.
Furthermore, at all subsequent parliamentary hearings, Cravinho always insisted on downplaying the derailment, taking nearly two months to send the IGDN’s audit to the Court and only after criminal suspicions had become public did he send it to the Public Prosecution Service, six months later.
Source: DN
