Paulo Raimundo accuses the government of protecting those who want to “extract as much as possible” for economic groups

On Tuesday, the secretary general of the PCP accused the government of protecting those who want to “take out as many economic groups as possible and as quickly as possible,” given that the situation in Santa Casa da Misericordia is another example of this.

At a press conference at the Jean Monnet European Center in Lisbon, Paulo Raimundo was asked whether he considered the dismissal of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (SCML) table to be a “political purge”, to which he replied that he did. I don’t want to use this expression, but you shouldn’t “close your eyes” either.

The communist leader recalled that the Minister of Labour, Solidarity and Social Security Maria do Rosario Palma Ramalho said a few days ago that the acquitted SCML Ombudsman Ana Jorge “had two weeks to present a report” which was “everything is clear that it is impossible” .

“So he found an excuse to change it. In presenting the Government’s program, we made a statement that I will repeat: this is a Government that protects interests, whose goal is to extract as much as possible and as quickly as possible. , from capital and economic groups,” he emphasized.

According to the PKP leader, the leader “will do everything in his power to achieve this.”

“This is perhaps another example. We had several areas of SCML, even with different projects, very different from each other, and we had audits, procedures, we had unraveling the thread of the tangle… I hope that this thread will not return another mess, and we will not know how everything evolved,” he said.

Paulo Raimundo recalled that SCML “is not a private institution in the sense that what happens inside does not concern” the public, stressing that the institution is “protected by the government.”

The communist leader also stressed that SCML “helps thousands of people, in some cases this is a great guarantee of living with a minimum of dignity,” and stated that it is necessary to protect “its workers who have survived very fierce battles, attacks about your rights.”

“The institution itself needs to be protected and I think that’s what we all need to focus on: the workers, those who are supported by the SCML, the institution itself, and I think these partisan partisans and political parties have as their target everything but defense of these three issues,” he said.

The government announced on Monday that SCML’s management had been sacked “with immediate effect,” citing the team’s “inability to cope with the institution’s serious financial and operational challenges.”

The SCML is currently headed by former socialist health minister Ana Jorge, who served as ombudsman for about a year, and the remaining SCML board consisted of a deputy ombudsman and four members.

“Unfortunately, this decision became inevitable as the now retiring Board proved unable to cope with the institution’s serious financial and operational challenges, which could, in the short term, jeopardize the fundamental mission of social action for which it is responsible,” he explained. . in an executive statement.