Gonçalo Matias, Minister of State Reform
The Court of Auditors rejects the accusations made by Minister Gonçalo Matias, who stated that the inspection led to a delay of years in the works and contributed to the financial slippage.
The Court of Auditors (TdC) rejected any responsibility for delays recorded in the construction of the future Hospital de Todos-os-Santos, in Lisbon. In a statement, the institution guarantees that the prior inspection process took place within the legal deadlines and highlights that it granted the contract approval in just 27 working days.
The response comes after the Deputy Minister and State Reform, Gonçalo Matias, stated that the intervention of the Court of Auditors delayed the project “by years”, contributing to a estimated cost increase of 164 million euros. The TCU counters that it analyzed a highly complex contract, valued at more than 800 million euros and expected to last 30 years, within a public-private partnership model.
According to the court, during the inspection process, several flaws and illegalities identified which required three requests for clarification and additional documentation. Among the problems detected were the absence of the contractual price, the lack of ministerial authorizationthe omission of the identification of the contract manager and clauses considered incompatible with the Tenders Code, says the .
The Todos-os-Santos Hospital project has a long history. The international public competition was released in December 2017but the award of the work to Mota-Engil only occurred in July 2022. The draft contract was approved in January 2024 and the agreement formalized the following month. The contract reached the Court of Auditors in February 2024, having received a favorable approval on May 28 of the same year.
Located in Marvila, in the eastern part of Lisbon, the new hospital will replace six units currently spread across the city: the São José, Santa Marta, Santo Antônio dos Capuchos, Dona Estefânia and Curry Cabral hospitals, in addition to the Alfredo da Costa Maternity Hospital. The new infrastructure will have capacity for 879 beds, a number that can increase to 1065 in contingency situations.
Successive delays in the execution of the project had relevant financial consequences. The government was forced to create, in April this year, a commission to renegotiate aspects of the contract management, after the delay in the work had led to a loss of 100 million euros of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), initially intended for partial financing of the project.
