Claims Marcelo displays “attitude of permanent boycott” towards parliamentary committee
One controversy that is not going away for the summer is the favoritism row centering on whether or not President Marcelo pulled strings, on the request of his son, to ensure twins living in Brazil were treated with the most expensive medication in the world… paid for by the Portuguese State health service.
Many will have already lost interest in the ‘Luso-Brazilian twins wrangle’ by now. But for CHEGA this issue is a crusade to expose the iniquities at play in Portuguese society.
CHEGA’s focus is on the ‘unfairness’; on the fact that there is no level playing field in this country, and everything depends on who you know, and how much clout they muster.
The problem with this argument (and the reason so many people have lost interest) is that citizens are already well aware of how things ‘work’ in this country. It may not be fair – but ‘it has always been thus’…
In an era however where nothing is any longer allowed to be as it used to be, CHEGA has seized on this story.
Today, party leader André Ventura – a member of the commission of public inquiry set up to investigate the story – has accused the Presidency of the Republic for acting “on the edge of legality” by hiding “fundamental elements’ (meaning emails, which, according to the presidency ‘have only recently come to light’).
Ventura holds no truck with emails ‘only recently coming to light’. In his opinion, President Marcelo appears to have been waging a “permanent boycott attitude” towards the commission of inquiry.
At a press conference at the party’s national headquarters in Lisbon today, Ventura ripped into the tardy delivery of new elements “because it has concealed from parliament, the Attorney General’s Office, and from entities administratively instigated for this purpose, elements that are fundamental for analysing the decision-making process”.
The new set of emails were handed over to the commission last week.
As Lusa explains: “It was these communications that generated a moment of tension between the CHEGA leader and Maria João Ruela – the President’s adviser – after André Ventura accused the adviser of lying to the commission of inquiry by saying that she had no knowledge of a supposed email notifying her of the case and what to do, which had not been sent to parliament” (and which now has come to light).
“Don’t accuse me of lying, I think it affects my honour,’ Ruela had replied (the act of besmirching someone’s honour in Portugal is still a criminal offence).
For André Ventura, the revelation finally of these emails’ existence stands as “a warning sign (…) that it is not enough to sit back and wait for the elements; that it is not enough to uncritically and passively accept everything they (the president’s entourage) send” and that the committee needs to do its “own investigation’.
It was here that Ventura suggested Marcelo has (as he believes the current and previous governments have too) a “permanent boycott attitude” towards the work of the commission of inquiry.
And so, as politicians pack up for the summer break – some with a reading list, others not – CHEGA is showing no signs of relaxing its ‘dog-with-a-bone’ focus.
Ventura has called on all the public bodies involved in the case to “once again review what they have said and done, to find all the emails” that the commission “still doesn’t have”, to avoid “new situations of omission”.
He also insists that his party will once again propose to the commission that the Presidency of the Republic, and the Ministry of Health, hand over “all the elements at their disposal in this matter.
“When we say all, we mean all. All the communications within the legal framework we have in place; all the administrative acts; all the subpoenas; all the emails – whether or not they were found in the first phase – must be handed over so that the country, and above all this committee of enquiry, can understand how this was handled”, he concluded.
In many ways, however, the country already understands how this situation was handled.
It has seen news stories about a judge thinking President Marcelo had a much more active role than he has admitted; and it has seen the report by IGAS (the general inspectorate of activities in health) which concluded there was indeed irregular access to the remedy that cost the Portuguese purse €4 million.
The controversy is already the subject of a criminal inquiry – and that inquiry has already involved search warrants and named defendants.
It is not difficult to see there is something very rotten in this story, and therefore probably something fairly whiffy in high places, too.
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
