The PSD president wrote a letter to the Prime Minister urging the resignation of the Secretary General of the Information System of the Portuguese Republic and warns that if this does not happen, the leadership of the “secret” will lose the confidence of the social democrats.
“If there is no resignation, I want your Excellency to know that an unprecedented fact will happen in the entire Portuguese democracy: the leadership of the SIRP will no longer have the confidence of the main opposition party. I hope that the SIRP will continue to serve the state, but will only do so with the approval and confidence of the government,” writes Luís Montenegro in the letter, to which Lusa had access.
In the letter dated Thursday, the contents of which have been communicated to the President of the Republic, Montenegro expects the Social Democrats “to propose in due course a change in the system of parliamentary oversight” of the information services, “to make it more transparent and more effective”.
The Social Democratic leader insists on “the need to replace the Secretary General of the SIRP”, says Ambassador Graça Mira Gomes, “despite the misuse by the government of asking for the intervention of the SIRP in practice” at the recovery of the computer taken over from the Ministry of Infrastructure on the night of April 26, “this service should never have acceded to such a request”.
“The intervention of the SIRP/SIS is not appropriate, it makes no sense, it has no legal basis” and therefore “the services should have refrained from intervening”, he argues.
However, “having done the opposite, the necessary consequences cannot be missed”, and therefore the president of the PSD urges the dismissal “of the person most responsible for the information services: the general secretary of the SIRP” .
To António Costa, Montenegro writes: “You can insist on keeping everything the same. It is all the more likely given the promiscuity that existed in this case between the government and the intelligence services. But in this circumstance, the rule has been broken according to policy. ” with the leaders of these services simultaneously benefiting from the confidence of the government and the main opposition party”.
For the chairman of the PSD, “there was an abuse of power in the relationship the government had with the information services, asking in practice to intervene on the issue of the computer used by the former adviser to the minister of Infrastructure”.
“The Government has not presented any legal basis for making this request. Theft – that was and is the phrase used by Your Excellency – is a matter requiring police intervention, not the intervention of an entity that does not have that authority. Your Excellency does it know that it is. He knows it as a prime minister and he knows it as a lawyer,” Montenegro claims.
According to the Social Democrats, “the generic argument that the equipment contained sensitive and secret information does not hold, because if it did, the situation before April 26 was already abnormal because the computer was assigned and owned by someone not accredited for it”.
Montenegro insists on the “need to replace Galamba”.
The PSD assures that it will “take all possible steps for a more demanding inspection of the conduct of the information services” so that “this abusive and irregular behavior does not become standard in government life, and admits that it was no longer the case before” .
The leader of the Social Democrats also believed that this week’s parliamentary hearing of the Prime Minister’s Deputy Secretary of State, António Mendonça Mendes, “made it clear” that the Minister of Infrastructure, João Galamba, “lacked the truth” in the parliamentary committee TAP inquiry.
“Without prejudice to the investigation this may entail in the courthouse, there is a political-ethical issue to which Your Excellency must pay particular attention: the need to replace your minister, because he has behaved which is not permissible on the part of ruler in a democratic constitutional state. This is not a banal contradiction. Rather, it is a deliberate lie, compounded by the fact that it was adopted in a parliamentary investigative body.” to blame.
Montenegro also recalls that António Costa “shared responsibility for all the actions of this minister when he decided not to accept his resignation and the associated institutional confrontation with the President of the Republic”.
The controversy surrounding the intelligence services is related to the dismissal of a former assistant to the Minister of Infrastructure, on the night of April 26, and concerns complaints against Frederico Pinheiro for physical violence in that ministry and the alleged theft of a laptop, case that is being investigated by the Public Prosecution Service.
Source: DN
