It was paraded by former Socialist Prime Minister José Sócrates as the “most ambitious and important” educational plan that would “make Portugal one of the top five most technologically advanced countries in Europe” – but it has ended in a sea of allegations of corruption, back-handers and lack of transparency, with a total debt of over €35 million.
This week, government-led meetings between national communications authority Anacom, the tax authorities and mobile phone operators will discuss the winding up of the controversial “Magalhães Foundation” – the programme since labelled “a scam” that started in 2008 with schoolchildren throughout Portugal being offered cut-price computers through the ‘e-escolas’ and ‘e-escolinhas’ initiatives in a bid to revolutionise teaching in the State system.
Some received their computers for nothing, others for €50 – when the retail price tag was four times that amount.
The bottom-line message was that the little blue Magalhães notebooks would send computer literacy among Portugal’s youth into the stratosphere – but instead, the Magalhães Foundation became famous for all the wrong reasons.
Accusations of fraud and tax evasion against many of those involved in the implementation of the government’s educational programme – including the Portuguese manufacturer JP Sá Couto – are currently being investigated by the state fiscal authorities and up to 50 people have had to testify in court.
Next week, the government plans to discuss the closure of the beleaguered Magalhães Foundation (proper name: Fundação para as Comunicações Móveis à TMN, Optimus e Vodafone, or FCM), expected before the end of the year, and organise payment to its main creditors.
As Público newspaper reports, debts run to “around €35 million”.
If everything goes as planned, Público reveals: “The creation of a new working group articulated between the Finanças, Ministry of Economy and mobile phone operators will see payment concluded by the end of the year and the “Magalhães Foundation”, which operated out of an office in Lisbon and has for a long time had no elected representatives, will cease to function.”
The government planned this extinction from the very beginning of its mandate, adds the newspaper – describing FCM as “an entity that, beyond the obscurity clouding the financial model of its distribution programmes” throughout the school system “had the particularity of running an educational programme for primary schools that had no articulation whatsoever with the Ministry of Education”.
