The socialists announced that they were going to call minister Pinto Luz to parliament to clarify whether he has the conditions to oversee the TAP privatization process and question the Prime Minister whether this member of his Government is capable of continuing.
The Prime Minister, Luís Montenegro, stated this Sunday that “the PS misses” minister Miguel Pinto Luz and that he will go to parliament, “with pleasure, to provide all the clarifications” about TAP.
The socialists announced that to clarify whether he has the conditions to oversee the TAP privatization process and question the Prime Minister whether this member of his Government is capable of continuing.
These two political initiatives were announced to the Lusa agency by the PS parliamentary leader, Eurico Brilhante Dias, shortly after the period for the presentation of expressions of interest by aviation groups that could compete for the TAP privatization process had ended.
“I don’t know what’s new, honestly, I don’t even know how many times Minister Pinto Luz has been to parliament to talk about this, but if there’s one more here, here’s another one. I believe that the Socialist Party has been making this type of statement for 10 years and since the engineer Pinto Luz has been Minister of Infrastructure and Housing, he has been questioned on many different occasions, it was just a few weeks ago in parliament, and also about this dossier”, reacted the prime minister, in Luanda, as part of a visit to Angola, before the European Union-African Union Summit.
“The Socialist Party already misses engineer Pinto Luz, it wants to hear from him again, engineer Pinto Luz will certainly go to parliament, with pleasure, to provide all the clarifications on the TAP privatization process”, added Luís Montenegro.
The government official highlighted that the company is currently in a “process of privatization of part of the capital” e “to be contested by the three major European operators” and remembered “the investment that Portuguese taxpayers made in TAP of 3.2 billion euros, in a process of renationalization of those who are now worried about understanding for the umpteenth time what engineer Pinto Luz thinks about this subject”.
“But with a sense of responsibility and with all transparency, with all tranquility, we will provide the clarifications that are necessary”, he promised, to conclude: “There is one thing I know, the Portuguese are tired of this issue, and what the Portuguese want is tranquility, and for TAP to be viable”.
On Tuesday, the PJ carried out searches at TAP, the Barreiro group and Parpública, in an investigation led by the Central Department of Investigation and Penal Action (DCIAP) on suspicion of crimes in the privatization of the airline in 2015 – when the current minister Pinto Luz was Secretary of State of the second PSD/CDS executive led by Pedro Passos Coelho.
The socialist parliamentary leader, Eurico Brilhante Dias, stressed that the PS decided “with a sense of State” wait for the end of the period for the presentation of expressions of interest to take these political initiatives, especially so that no political intervention could be confused with a possible devaluation of TAP.
