With an uncanny sense of timing, former TAP CEO Christine Ourmières-Widener has blasted back into view in Portugal – just as the government is intent on reprivatising the flagship airline on as favourable terms as possible.
The fact that TAP is dogged by lawsuits – from staff it ‘illegally dismissed’ and a CEO who claims the same fate – will not play well in negotiations.
But today’s pasting in Expresso may well make the situation even worse.
Say all reports, Ms Ourmières Widener is “calling for justice” in relation to her dismissal in 2023 (which she claims was entirely without grounds) and exposing “structural problems in public governance” in Portugal.
Her case, the former CEO explains, reveals much about ‘public governance Portuguese-style’: “when difficult reforms are delegated, but their political cost is not taken on; when the results are appropriate, but responsibility becomes disposable; when management is tolerated while useful, and dismissed when it becomes inconvenient, the problem ceases to be individual. It becomes structural.”
Her dismissal, she claims, was because former prime minister António Costa’s “political survival” was at stake. It is exactly what she told a parliamentary commission two years ago.
In today’s opinion article “It’s her or us” – referring to the phrase allegedly used in a conversation over the catastrophic (illegal) golden handshake, authorised by Ms Ourmières-Widener, with approval of the government, that preceded her dismissal – the former CEO suggests the delay over hearing her almost €6 million lawsuit are far from neutral.
To recap, the lawsuit was filed in September 2023. In May last year TAP filed an appeal against the decision that green-lighted the lawsuit to proceed to trial in Lisbon Civil Court – and since then, nothing. In the words of Lusa today “Christine Ourmières-Widener’s lawsuit (…) is thus pending with no date set yet for the trial to begin.”
In Ourmières-Widener’s mindset, “when the decision is postponed indefinitely, time ceases to be neutral. It takes on political, legal and, worst of all, human weight.”
Aside from going over the old ground in which she insists she has been deeply, immorally wronged, Ms Ourmières-Widener’s article stands as a warning: she is not giving up, and she may well take a number of reputations down with her if the Portuguese judicial system continues to sit on that lawsuit.
Sources: Expresso/ LUSA
