Another ‘millionaire contract’ has suddenly been highlighted as the long-awaited privatisation of flagship airline TAP gets underway.
Minister for infrastructures and housing Miguel Pinto Luz concedes TAP’s reputation will be affected – but that the government is “working so that this can be the best privatisation possible”.
It has been universally accepted that there is no way the country can ever recover the billions of euros ploughed into TAP over recent years.
Former prime minister António Costa floated a €900 million ‘best case scenario’ for selling the airline in 2023, and since then there have been a number of setbacks, not least the decision by the Supreme Court to rule staff dismissals during the pandemic as ‘illegal’ (TAP consequently faces compensation claims of up to €300 million).
But it is the investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office into the original privatisation (in the dying hours of the last PSD government) that has thrown up today’s ‘revelations’, broken by Correio da Manhã tabloid, and subsequently repeated by other media outlets.
As CM explains, the public prosecutors’ investigation into TAP involves suspicions of ‘ruinous management, economic participation in business, passive corruption, qualified fiscal fraud and qualified Social Security fraud”.
Searches have already taken place, arguidos (official suspects) named, and now comes the story that former TAP CEO Fernando Pinto celebrated a consultancy deal with TAP in 2018, five days after he left his post on the board, through a company that did not even exist at the time.
As a consultant, Fernando Pinto received more than €1.62 million from TAP between 2018 and 2020.
Per month, Pinto received €67,000, says CM – stressing that when an audit was carried out by IGF (the general inspectorate of finances), “it was not possible to scrutinise the work carried out by Fernando Pinto”.
SIC puts the situation more bluntly: “ There are suspicions that the money paid does not correspond with work undertaken”.
Also on the day that the ‘company-that-didn’t-exist-at-the-time’ celebrated its contract with TAP, Fernando Pinto “celebrated a complementary agreement” which gave him five years of health insurance, two years of life insurance, a company car, a company telephone and flight perks on TAP planes.
Considering that it was in 2021 that the government of the time found itself having to go cap in hand to Europe for a major restructuring deal to bring TAP back from the brink, this new information has done little to promote the privatisation process.
Sources: Correio da Manhã/ SIC/
