The coordinator of the Bloco de Esquerda this Sunday accused the Ministry of Finance, led by Fernando Medina, of “acting like you never know anything” about TAP and believed that this situation is “increasingly difficult”.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult for the Ministry of Finance to continue to pretend that it never knows what is happening at TAP,” Catarina Martins said at a press conference at the end of a meeting of the National Bureau of BE, in Lisbon. .
The bloc leader pointed out that “TAP’s custody is divided between Infrastructure and Finance” and that “the appointment of state shareholder representatives is a responsibility of the Ministry of Finance, as well as the responsibility of the Ministry of Finance, as are the capital injections at TAP “.
“It is difficult for us to understand that the Treasury Department has gone to such lengths to ignore everything that is happening at TAP or what happened at TAP,” he said.
Catarina Martins was asked about Friday night’s news by SIC Notícias, according to which the draft opinion of the General Inspectorate of Finance “points to the existence of serious irregularities in the process” of Alexandra Reis.
In a statement released today, the Treasury Department states that “once the inspection action is complete and the report is prepared, the Treasury Secretary will immediately make the conclusions public and determine what is necessary to fully ensure legality”.
The still BE coordinator – who announced she is not running for leadership at the next convention in late May – declined to jump to conclusions without reading the document, but believed that “with what is known from the news, there are clearly consequences that they will have to withdraw on the validity of the contract itself, changes that a non-conformity of the contract certainly requires”.
Catarina Martins pointed out that “the issues of justice belong to justice and the issues of legality are strict issues of legality, and when there is such illegality, there may even be nullity of the contract”.
The BE leader opined that “this is a good thing for the Commission of Inquiry” proposed by her party, and reiterated that “the affairs of David Neeleman [ex-acionista] and how TAP paid for its own purchase of the company’ can be analyzed in the context of the Commission of Inquiry.
“The object of the Commission of Inquiry allows the Commission of Inquiry to also deal with this issue, because its scope is related to the decisions of the guardianship where the public interest may have been harmed,” he defended, stating that “these decisions touch each other, because it is the period that goes from privatization to nationalization”.
And he claimed that “the purpose of the committee said that these years in particular, but in fact it is about this management”.
“This whole period from privatization, to the departure of one of the private entities, to nationalization and the actions that harmed the public interest, is a sufficiently precise object to draw conclusions, and it falls within the scope of what was approved,” he stressed, defending that “however, parliament cannot ignore signs that appear and need to be investigated”.
The parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the political oversight of TAP’s governance, proposed by BE, started this week in the Assembly of the Republic.
Source: DN
