Secretary of State’s €80,000 ‘indemnity’ has already been condemned as “immoral”
Another contentious golden handshake hit the headlines with the arrival of Portugal’s new government, and today in parliament Secretary of State for Mobility, Cristina Dias, will be heard about her departure from CP (Comboios de Portugal) – and why she believes the handshake was completely fair and legal.
To recap, the ‘furore’ about the payment initially centred on the fact that Ms Dias left CP in July of 2015 (with her sizeable indemnity) to walk straight into another job in the public sector (at AMT, the authority for mobility and transport) which paid almost double the salary she had been receiving at CP ( €13,440 per month as opposed to CP’s €7,210).
Tabloid Correio da Manhã broke the story (as it has with other questionable ‘golden handshakes’) – and straight away the outrage from opposing political parties was molten, particularly from CHEGA whose electoral platform was built on tackling the cronyism it sees as rife in the country’s leading political parties.
Since CM’s ‘exposé’ however more questions have bobbed to the surface – taking the whole subject beyond what may or may not have been ethically correct.
CM today explains that the €80,000 indemnity “runs the risk of being illegal” – for the simple reason that Ms Pinto made her ‘request’ to be included in CP’s programme for “amicable terminations” to the Administrative Council, of which she was a member. In other words, the amount of compensation payable was decided by an entity in which she herself played a part.
“Various legal experts” consider that without a special ‘opinion’ under terms of country’s Code of Commercial Societies, the indemnity paid could not be considered valid – and there appears to have been no ‘opinion’ sought by the Administrative Council.
Francisco Fortunato, former director of EMEF (Railway Equipment Maintenance Company) has maintained (even back in 2015) that “no rules were complied with” and the compensation paid to Ms Dias was “an act of mismanagement, damaging the public interest and done with total disregard for existing rules and the policy of austerity applied at the time by the government to most workers”.
And that withering assessment will be what hangs over the hearing today.
Up till now, PSD sources have tended to argue in Ms Dias’ favour: earlier this month, for example, Sérgio Monteiro, the former Secretary of State for Infrastructure, Transport and Communications in the PSD/CDS-PP government in place during the so-called troika years when citizens were seemingly financially penalised at every turn, that Cristina Dias was “unaware of the salary she would be earning at AMT when she asked to leave CP”, which in itself sounds remarkable, if not bizarre.
As it was, her salary at AMT has been described by CHEGA’s André Ventura as “higher than that of the president of Portugal”.
