Pedro Nuno Santos: “We interfered in TAP’s affairs because we didn’t want them to fall apart”

“We intervened in TAP because we didn’t want it to collapse,” Minister of Infrastructure and Housing Pedro Nuno Santos, who was heard in Parliament this Wednesday, assured of TAP’s privatization.

The infrastructure minister said this Wednesday that the TAP administration has requested an audit because it suspects it is paying more for planes than competitors, and that the government has forwarded the results to the public administration ministry.
The minister also stated that “it doesn’t matter if it was 50% public or private, what matters is whether it existed in 2020.”

“Administration [da TAP]at some point, I suspected that we would pay for those aircraft for which we pay more than our competitors pay. […] The administration requested an audit, this audit was completed, delivered to the government, and we, faced with doubts about the conclusions of this audit, sent the audit to the state ministry,” the Minister of Infrastructure and Housing, Pedro Nuno Santos, said at a hearing in the Assembly of the Republic at the request of the PCP and Chega on the privatization of TAP, followed by hearings on the award of government contracts by a company with a stake of more than 10% of the father of the ruler, at the request of the PS.

Pedro Nuno Santos also pointed the finger at the SDP again, accusing it of being a “mere protest party” that offers no solutions, for something he said it didn’t envision what it would do in 2020. when the TAP was experiencing difficulties exacerbated by the pandemic.

Pedro Nuno Santos also said the government was consistent and added that the airline was recovering and had “already started paying the Portuguese.”

The minister also recalled the government’s PSD/CDS-PP privatization, partly canceled in 2015, in which TAP was sold for 10 million euros to “a shareholder who owed the company even more.”

Moreover, it was this private administration, headed by David Neeleman, who upgraded the airline’s aircraft fleet.

The minister reiterated that there is “no tumbling” in the government’s position on TAR privatization, as he argued in the SDP-demanded debate last week.

“The only thing that has always been assumed is that we understood that TAP is an airline in a highly consolidated sector, it cannot be left alone, the best way to guarantee viability in the medium and long term is to be part of major aviation. group,” the ruler stressed.

In response to PSD MP Paulo Ríos de Oliveira, who mentioned an injection of 270 million euros made by a former private shareholder of the company, the Minister of Infrastructure said that the injection was 224 million and that the PSD had not yet explained “whether there was actually capitalization, or if there was more big debt.”

“They promised capitalization, as a result of which the company’s capitalization did not happen, on the contrary, this led to a debt that we still pay today, apparently, in order not to be more objective, to pay more for aircraft than our competitors,” he said. minister.

Paulo Ríos de Oliveira also accused the government of failing to tell taxpayers that €3,200 million was “non-refundable”.

“They told the Portuguese, who they want to give 125 euros, that they took 320 euros from each?” asked the Social Democrat MP.

In response, Pedro Nuno Santos considered that the reading of the decisions of the socialist government should be made “in the light of the results of the January elections”, in which the PS won by an absolute majority.

“When we went to the elections, Mr. Paulo Rios, TAP had already intervened and we had already ordered them in Brussels to inject 3,200 million euros into TAP. We went to the polls and won. […] The political leader of the Social Democratic Party, who was supported by the deputy during the election campaign, tried several times to take advantage of the case of the PVR,” the minister stressed.