Appoints former fuel entity boss (who okayed oil drilling in inland Algarve)
The government is preparing a fusion of five entities in the energy sector – the idea, say reports, being to make it “more financially and administratively robust”.
At the head of merger between the DGEG (general directorate of energy and geology), LMEG (the national laboratory of energy and geology), ENSE (the national entity for the energy sector), ADENE (the agency for energy) and EDM (the entity for the development of mining) will be just one man: Paulo Carmona, the former chief of former energy entity ENMC who, just under a decade ago, believed it was fine to offer a company with no experience of drilling for oil or gas a generous slice of the Algarve in which to prospect for oil.
Reports this far in national media have barely mentioned Paulo Carmona’s past connections to the ‘great Portuguese oil and gas carve-up’ instigated under the outgoing government of Pedro Passos Coelho (and fought against tooth-and-nail by local populations) – simply that he is the government’s choice to head up the new structure that will result from the merger of five current organisations in the energy sector.
According to Observador, Carmona will be taking up his new appointment tomorrow (September 2).
This reorganisation “comes as no surprise”, says the online, “given that the Democratic Alliance’s (AD) electoral programme envisaged reforming the public regulatory and administrative institutions in the energy sector, in order to reduce bureaucracy, speed up licensing and authorisation processes and strengthen supervision”.
In the same electoral programme, AD spoke of the need to “technically and humanly empower DGEG and the other national public energy institutions and agencies (…) Portugal needs a new policy and new governance (…) a new impetus is needed for environmental and energy policies, with renewed ambition and a focus on the future”.
“Greater financial and administrative autonomy”
According to Negócios, the new public institute emerging will have greater financial and administrative autonomy than the entities it is effectively absorbing. It will also “reduce management positions” (meaning a number of current bosses look like being out of a job, saving the government in hefty salaries…)
Step one of this process began last week, with the dismissal of the DGEG boss (a former deputy for one of the last government’s secretaries of state for energy, in place for less than a year).
Picking up this story, Correio da Manhã has said it is not clear at this point what will happen to the various head honchos of the entities that are effectively disappearing.
