The hearing of Frederico Pinheiro, the former deputy of the Ministry of Infrastructure who was acquitted by João Galamba, begins this Wednesday with two more days of high tension in the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the management of TAP. And if on the table is the clarification of what happened at the Ministry of Infrastructure, precisely in the month of January and between April 5 and April 26, there will be much more than that in the background. With the permanence of João Galamba in the government motivating an iron arm between the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic, turning relations between São Bento and Belém sour, what comes out of these two days will also be a strengthening or a weakening of the position of strength taken by António Costa, based in everything on the version told by João Galamba.
In concrete terms, the hearings of the next two days (at which this Wednesday the Chief of Staff of the Minister of Infrastructure, Eugénia Correia) will also be present, the exact outline of the January meeting that brought together PS deputies, government advisers and then TAP president Christine Ourmières-Widener. And then everything that happened in the Ministry of Infrastructure, from April 5 (date of an internal meeting intended to collect all the documents to be handed over by the Ministry to the CPI) and April 26, when Frederico Pinheiro, already acquitted, leaves the Ministry with his duty computer and the SIS is activated to pick him up. A timeline along which there are divergent versions, multiple contradictions and gray areas. Here are some of the key points to clarify.
Who tried to hide the notes at the CPI?
At the center of this whole affair are two meetings in January, one between Minister João Galamba and Christine Ourmières-Widener (on January 16), the second (on January 17) between the then Executive Chairman of TAP, representatives of the PS and Government Advisers , which will have served to prepare the hearing of the head of the airline in the Economy Committee, scheduled for the next day. It is already known that it was Galamba who informed the chairman of TAP about the meeting with socialist deputies, but the versions of the minister and the former deputy (who was present) differ on the purpose of this controversial meeting, which was largely targeted by the opposition. And they become absolutely contradictory in the next step: Frederico Pinheiro guarantees that he always said that there were notes from that meeting, that he informed the minister about it and that João Galamba wanted to hide them from the CPI, since the notes would show that there was a combination of questions for the parliamentary hearing. The Minister of Infrastructure, on the other hand, claims that the former adviser did not disclose these notes until April 24, the deadline by which the ministry must send all information to the CPI – and despite insistence on sending them, he did not do so until the evening of the next day.
What happened at the Ministry on April 26?
In the early evening of April 26, with Galamba having just arrived from a visit to Singapore, Frederico Pinheiro is cleared by the minister by telephone and goes to the ministry to collect his computer – so far the accounts of both sides match. But not about what happened next: Galamba says that Frederico Pinheiro attacked other members of his team (which the former deputy denies) and that he “stole” the computer (a phrase later repeated by António Costa), which he would no longer have access rights because he had been acquitted. The target denies any embezzlement, claiming that he went to get the computer to make a copy of the information he had stored, to defend himself in the future.
Who called the SIS and why?
It’s one of the most sensitive issues on the table, an additional controversy to the many that have arisen that relate more directly to TAP. At this point there is only one certainty: the SIS (Security Information Service) was called in to recover the computer that Frederico Pinheiro had stolen from the ministry. Who called? João Galamba made the following report at a press conference on April 29: “I was not at the ministry when the attack on my chief of staff and my assistant took place. I immediately called the prime minister, I think he was driving and he did not take I called the deputy foreign minister with the prime minister to whom I reported this fact I think he was the secretary of state, also assistant to the prime minister, for administrative modernization, who They told me to talk to the Minister of Justice, which I did”. Here comes the indication that “I should report this fact to those two authorities [SIS e PJ]what we did”. “We have reported to the SIS and the PJ because they are the entities dealing with data protection and cybersecurity,” said the Minister of Infrastructure.
After this contact by João Galamba’s Chief of Staff, it was SIRP’s General Secretary, Graça Mira Gomes, who activated the SIS, as proposed by DN, in a version later confirmed by the Supervisory Board. But according to Público, during the closed-door hearings that took place last Thursday in the parliamentary committee for constitutional affairs, the director of SIS and the secretary-general of SIRP added a new interlocutor to the process: the contacts will have been made by the Ministry of the presidency, by Mariana Vieira da Silva.
And can the SIS issue be discussed at the CPI?
The performance of the SIS, the manner in which it took place and the legality of this intervention should not be a peaceful issue during these hearings, as the specific object of analysis of the CPI is the political oversight of TAP’s management. The fact that the SIS issue is also dealt with in the Committee on Constitutional Affairs will be another factor to be taken into account at a time when the the opposition is already talking about a parliamentary committee of inquiry to investigate the functioning of the SIS.
Source: DN
