Catarina Martins, coordinator of the Bloco de Esquerda (BE), said this Saturday that it should be the Prime Minister who says how the SIS was activated [Serviço de Informações de Segurança] in the case of alleged theft of a government computer.
“Since there is a service that only the Prime Minister can activate, the SIS, the Prime Minister needs to tell Parliament how this happened, because we need to know if it was activated improperly or if it acted without anyone telling him. asked. , which is also inappropriate,” said the BE leader in Amarante, Porto district.
According to Catarina Martins, “the version that the Prime Minister gave to the country has many contradictions”. “Now I don’t know if the Prime Minister had access to all the facts or not,” he added, referring to António Costa’s written answer to the TAP Commission of Inquiry that could clear the doubts.
The leader opined that there were two hypotheses: “Either the SIS had instructions to act and the only instructions could have come from the Prime Minister, who should not have, or it acted without those instructions and it is extremely serious that it did because it couldn’t.”
In both cases, according to him, there is “abuse by the SIS that cannot go unpunished, that cannot remain inexplicable”.
Catarina Martins, who visited the weekly fair in Amarante with local leaders, said people in contact with the population “speak with immense dismay at what they see of the government and this lack of credibility”.
“I don’t think there was anyone I didn’t talk to who didn’t say, ‘Do you think this is right? It looks like they’re kidding us,'” he told reporters covering the visit to the market.
For Catarina Martins, the way the Socialist government has taken its responsibility in managing various files, including the management of the airline TAP, discredits democracy and paralyzes the executive.
“What people see is that the government gets caught up in lies, in situations that tarnish the image of the institutions, and this is very serious,” he stressed, reaffirming the position of the BE, according to which the Minister of Infrastructure , João Galamba, has no conditions to remain in office.
“At the moment the Minister of Infrastructure is António Costa. No one believes that a fragile minister, like João Galamba, is dealing with files as complicated as the privatization of TAP. It is certainly the Prime Minister who is dealing with it,” he highlighted . .
According to the BE coordinator, what is discovered in the TAP parliamentary inquiry committee is “misuse of state institutions and, as everything indicates, also of information and security services, and this is extremely serious”.
The activation of the SIS refers to the alleged theft of a state computer by Frederico Pinheiro, former assistant to João Galamba, after he was acquitted in April.
The case involved allegations against Frederico Pinheiro for physical assault at the Ministry of Infrastructure, in addition to the theft of the laptop, and controversy intensified when the SIS intervened in the recovery of that computer.
The president of the republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, declined to comment in recent days on reports of violence within the ministry, the use of SIS and the contradictory versions of João Galamba and his former deputy presented in parliament.
Source: DN
