Former Secretary of State Alberto Souto admitted on Saturday that he advised former TAP administrator Lacerda Machado on the company’s 2020 budget, but declined to put political pressure on current management.
“The norm is that once a year, precisely when approving the budget, the shareholder talks to its representatives and indicates the position they should take,” Alberto Souto wrote on his Facebook account, recalling that he was in charge, “lead” of the company’s budget, at the direction of former Infrastructure Minister Pedro Nuno Santos.
Two days later, at a meeting of the Commission of Inquiry into the political oversight of TAP’s management, the former administrator admitted that he had been under political pressure, Alberto Souto contradicts his version, claiming that Lacerda presented “the film backwards” .
In “all public companies or companies with state capital” there is guidance in strategic documents and “this is the meaning of sound trusteeship,” he wrote in the text.
State administrators “are there”, in these companies, “to defend the interests of the state” and therefore “in many cases even the respective budgets are submitted to the Ministry of Finance for approval”.
For Alberto Souto, quoting Pedro Nuno Santos, “there couldn’t be two ministers for TAP”, himself and Lacerda Machado, who “didn’t have the humility to accept the orientation of the shareholder who appointed him”.
And he revealed that the former administrator “threatened to resign, but did not”.
On Thursday, former TAP executive Diogo Lacerda Machado assumed there was political pressure when Secretary of State Alberto Souto de Miranda asked him to vote against the airline’s 2020 budget.
“The budget of a company like TAP is not intended to be political,” the lawyer replied to PS deputy Fátima Fonseca and then to Bernardo Blanco of IL, after assuming that there was pressure from the government regarding the company budget for 2020.
Faced with Bernardo Blanco’s insistence, Lacerda Machado said that then Secretary of State Alberto Souto de Miranda, from Pedro Nuno Santos’ ministerial team, had asked him to vote against the budget.
“I said I wouldn’t do it,” added Lacerda Machado, saying he explained to the government that the legitimacy of his decision “came from the General Assembly elections,” but if the executive understood, he would resign. the position.
The former non-executive director also said the situation “hasn’t happened again”.
Lacerda Machado left the TAP board in April 2021, before the end of his tenure.
Source: DN
