According to the request, sent to Lusa, the PSD parliamentary group asked the chairman of the parliamentary committee for the economy, public works, planning and housing “to hear the former Minister of Planning and Infrastructure Pedro Marques, former Minister of Infrastructure and Housing Pedro Nuno Santos, former administrator of TAP Diogo Lacerda Machado and former Undersecretary of State and Finance [Ricardo] Mourinho Félix”, for clarification on the privatization of TAP.

The parliamentary group indicates as the reason for the request the incongruity of the positions of the government of António Costa, which canceled the privatization of the airline carried out in 2015 by the PSD/CDS-PP government of the time, but, in January of this year, declared in plenary of the Assembly of the Republic, that it is “in a phase of the process of total or partial alienation of the State’s participation in the TAP” and that this same process “is useful and necessary for the company to have eventual stability”.

Thus, for the PSD, these hearings are justified, “in the sense of clarifying what happened from one moment to the next, and trying to understand the reason for the change in attitude of the socialist government, considering that in the meantime the Portuguese State financed TAP with more than 3.2 billion euros as part of a restructuring plan approved in Brussels, – which involved layoffs, salary cuts and the loss of “niches”.

About two weeks ago, the ECO newspaper reported that the privatization of TAP in 2015 was won by former shareholder David Neeleman with money from the airline itself.

This Wednesday, the deputies approved, in the Economy Committee, the request of the PS to hear in parliament the former Minister of Economy António Pires de Lima and the former Secretary of State Sérgio Monteiro on the privatization of the TAP, in 2015.

These hearings fall outside the framework of the parliamentary commission of inquiry under the political supervision of the management of TAP, in particular between 2020 and 2022, proposed by BE, which started its work this week.

The parliamentary leader of the PS, Eurico Brilhante Dias, considered at the time that “parliamentary commissions of inquiry must have well-defined objects for the conclusions to be concrete” and insisted on the fact that “the further broadening of the spectrum of the commission of inquiry would not necessarily contribute to a better understanding”.

“There is nothing to prevent the parliament from exercising its oversight function and exercising its oversight function in the commission,” he said, adding that the information made public on the subject comes after the approval of the commission of inquiry.