Pires de Lima remains convinced that the Airbus deal was done at market prices. The former Minister of Economy is being heard by the TAP Inquiry Commission.

Pires de Lima makes an initial intervention and stresses that he is optimistic about the TAP privatization project, hoping that the Portuguese will be able to recoup some of the 3.2 billion euros invested in the company.

Deputy Paulo Ríos de Oliveira was the first to question the former economy minister, speaking about TAP’s strategic plan.

Pires de Lima reports that the TAP privatization model envisaged at the first stage 70% of the company being privatized, and after some time in 2017 it became possible to privatize the remaining 30%.

With regard to the path taken by the company, the former minister clarifies that the company, which is under private management, developed positively until 2019, and later the situation worsened due to the pandemic.

Former Economy Minister António Pires de Lima also said he remains deeply convinced that the Airbus deal, which allowed TAP to benefit from the 2015 privatization, was negotiated at market prices and benefited the company.

“I remain convinced that the deal concluded was made at market prices, the TAR did not suffer, but, on the contrary, the growth that lasted until 2019,” the former SDP minister told the parliamentary commission of inquiry on the TAR. / The CDS-PP government that privatized the airline in 2015 and then partially canceled by the PS government (with support in parliament from BE, PCP and PEV).

At stake are so-called Airbus funds arising from a deal by former TAP private shareholder David Neeleman with an aircraft manufacturer that involved swapping an order for 12 A350s for 53 new-range aircraft and “a contribution of more than €200 million from the manufacturer to the businessman who used them to capitalize TAP, as provided for in the privatization agreement.

Prior to Pires de Lima’s initial intervention, the PSD understands that it will file a request to extract the record of the João Galamba hearing and send it to the state ministry due to the CPI minister’s suspicions of “false statements”.

The decision came after the party revealed a “gross inconsistency” between statements by Mendonza Mendez, Joao Galamba and the prime minister.

On Tuesday, the Prime Minister’s Deputy Secretary of State confirmed that he had spoken to Minister Joao Galamba on the night of April 26, but denied any causal link between the phone call and the report to information services about the computer taken from the Ministry of Infrastructure. .

At the same Mendonça hearing, Mendez assured on Tuesday that there was “no” call for information services to act in the case of the computer seized from the Ministry of Infrastructure, stressing that “the report is not a call to act.”

Following these statements, the PSD Secretary General called on the Prime Minister to rehabilitate the Minister of Infrastructure “before the end of the day”, given that Joao Galamba was proven to have lied to Parliament and the country after listening to António Mendonça Mendez.

BE, on the other hand, announced that it would file a complaint with the Attorney General’s Office to assess the legal basis for SIS’s activities in recovering a computer from the Ministry of Infrastructure, while Chega and IL urged the prime minister to draw policy conclusions.

After all these reactions from the parties, the parliamentary leader of the PS considered that the case that the computer confiscated from the Ministry of Infrastructure was turned over to the SSS was “more than clear”, accusing the opposition of “facilitating the soap opera”.