New rules have been described as “a return to the madness of the 80s”
As of today, new rules governing the application of European funding (principally PRR – Plan for Recovery and Resilience funding) come into place, increasing, in the eyes of many, the risk of frauds and corruption.
Right at the start of PRR, the country was assured that no frauds COULD take place – even the president was to have a specialised team watching over contracts and spending so that not even a cêntimo could go the wrong way.
Over time, the rigour required to police this avalanche of funding has become an obstacle – thus prime minister Luís Montenegro, minister for Territorial Cohesion Manuel Castro Almeida and minister for parliamentary affairs Pedro Duarte “signed a proposal for a government law” which was carried (due to the abstention of PS Socialists, Iniciativa Liberal and PAN) in October.
According to transparency advocates, the result is that “we are going back to the madness of the 80s in which fortunes were made (with European funding) and everything was whitewashed” (this comment comes from João Paulo Batalha, vice-president of the ‘Frente Cívica’ association).
Marisa Matias, former Euro MP and now MP for Bloco Esquerda, was even more scathing: “The government’s proposal (now enshrined in law) is an open door to complete discretion in the spending of PRR funds, the opacity of public procurement procedures and the increased potential for cases of corruption or similar”.
So what did the government vote for? It voted for removing the ‘check’/ prior authorisation required by the country’s Tribunal de Contas (Accounts Court), on any and all contracts, independent of their value.
As Correio da Manhã stresses today, the Accounts Court “defended the maintenance of the prior authorisation, to guarantee rigour in the application of large sums of money over a short period of time”.
But that is the nub – “the short period of time” is now seen as ‘too short’ for the niceties of checks and balances.
When presenting this proposed law to parliament in September, Castro Almeida stressed: “we have been aware from the outset that it will not be possible to fully implement the PRR unless we make changes to the usual rules and practices” (what outset he was referring to is unclear: was it the outset of the PRR scheduling, or the outset of the PSD-CDS government? If the former, why has this only come out now?).
Castro Almeida did add, nonetheless, that “none of the alterations we are proposing today puts the fundamental concern of rigour and efficiency in the application of public resources at risk”.
This must be the case, if a minister says it is so. Perhaps everyone will be satisfied – but it is a great deal to swallow when one remembers the interview with Expresso in October in which minister for environment and energy Maria de Graça Carvalho said the government had ‘passed a ‘decreto-lei’ (decree law) that “impedes judicial embargoes (providências cautelares) from halting works in PRR projects”.
She explained that if judicial embargoes were allowed to take effect “it would be very difficult to complete the works”. When unpacked, this little sentence means that Portugal’s government will circumvent constitutional law, and checks and balances put into place to ensure transparency, in the name of ‘works funded by the European Union’.
It is not a good look.
Certainly, Rui Cardoso, the director of DCIAP (the central department of investigation and penal action), thinks the direction is foolhardy. He told a conference dedicated to corruption last week that the “simplification will be taken advantage of for ends that are distinct from those for which the funds were intended”.
Cardoso stressed the new law approved by the government means that even projects costed out at a billion euros would not have to be given prior authorisation. ND
Source material: Correio da Manhã/ Expresso
