Former PSD party leader Paulo Mota Pinto will resume his seat as a deputy next week, after a five-and-a-half month suspension, a parliamentary group source told Lusa.
Mota Pinto had asked for his five-month mandate to be suspended in mid-September, and in mid-February he asked for that suspension to be extended for a further two weeks, a period that ended on February 24.
On Friday, the university professor and former judge of the Constitutional Court (1998-2007) informed the leadership of the Social Democratic Bank and the President of the Assembly of the Republic that he would return next week.
According to the Statute of Deputies, the temporary suspension of the mandate for reasons of a family, personal, professional or academic nature can only take place for a period of six months per legislature, after which the parliamentarian must resume his duties or resign permanently.
Paulo Mota Pinto was President of the PSD Congress and National Council during the entire leadership of Rui Rio (2018-2022), Vice President of the PSD under Manuela Ferreira Leite and was a Deputy in the XI and XII Legislatures, in addition to the current one.
In April last year (when Rio’s departure was already certain, but Luís Montenegro had not yet been elected president of the PSD), Mota Pinto was the only candidate for the Social Democratic parliamentary leadership, winning 94% of the favorable vote.
Less than three months later, on June 30, the day before the start of the PSD Congress that determined the new leadership, Paulo Mota Pinto announced that he would call early elections for the bank’s leadership after being informed by Luís Montenegro that he intended to change the leadership of the parliamentary group.
“I was available to exercise the mandate and to cooperate, to express myself, with the leadership of the party,” he assured at the time.
His successor as leader of the PSD bank, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, would be elected on July 13 with 59% of the bank’s vote.
Source: DN
