TAP’s insistence that Lisbon Civil Court has “absolute incompetence” in matter considered “unfounded”
Almost a year since it was filed, the €5.9 million case for unfair dismissal lodged by former TAP CEO Christine Ourmières-Widener has taken new steps.
Coincidentally, these new steps come just as noises about the airline’s potential reprivatisation return to news headlines, albeit prepared for further time in the shadows due to the looming snap election.
Former TAP CEO Christine Ourmières Widener was ‘sacked on air’, during the height of (another) government crisis in 2023. She has always maintained that she was a scapegoat for the bad press of massive, and illegal, compensation payments agreed by the Socialist executive of the day – and that she had been doing an excellent job managing TAP up until that point.
Potentially working against Ms Ourmières Widener, however, is the recent news that she has also been dismissed from her subsequent job, leading two airlines in the Dubreuil group (Air Caraïbes and French Bee). According to Expresso, arguments used to dispense with the former top manager’s services were a “fall in revenue and degradation of services”.
TAP’s defence strategy argued that Lisbon’s Civil Court had no competence to hear the lawsuit lodged by Ms Ourmières Widener. This has now been deemed “unfounded”, and the case inches forwards.
