Spinumviva: information hiding denied; Montenegro was not heard before the news was published

The Prime Minister allegedly withheld information from the State services from those who asked for opinions on the Spinumviva case.

Luis Montenegro hid information from state serviceswho asked for opinions on the case Spinumviva, indicated the .

According to the newspaper, the prime minister helped himself to the State Legal Center to try to win the dispute that pitted him against the Transparency Entity.

But, according to the same source, the jurists had to issue an opinion on the case without knowing the process.

Montenegro’s cabinet will have asked jurists respond urgently to generic questions about the declaratory obligations that the Transparency Entity could require from the prime minister.

Furthermore, jurists were also not informed that Montenegro had 4 days to contest the Entity’s decision. Luís Montenegro delivered the appeal more than a month after the deadline.

The next day, the cabinet by Luís Montenegro denied this information.

“Recourse to the State Legal Center (Cejure) is legal and has full regulatory coverage. (…) There was no concealment of information from Cejure’s legal services.”

“The news suggests that the prime minister hid information from the state services he used. This statement does not correspond to the truth”, indicates the prime minister’s office, in a clarification sent to .

The note states that the questions of law “were posed in an abstract and legally delimited wayso that the opinions could be used by all members of the Government in the same situation, present and future. This option also aimed to preserve the necessary institutional distance from the case and the technical independence of the consultants”.

The legal issue underlying the process “It is not — nor has it ever been — a personal matter for the Prime Minister. It was an issue that arose because of and as a result of the exercise of the public functions of deputy and prime minister, therefore having a strictly institutional nature”, continues the clarification.

The Prime Minister’s office emphasizes that the Constitutional Court “did not rule on whether or not the law requires the disclosure of the list of clients and other corporate details” and “refused to consider the appeal based on a question of time”. Thus, “the substantive question of what the law actually requires” remains open.

The clarification also regrets that the Público released the news without contacting Luís Montenegro: “It was disclosed without the target having been assured of the right to a prior adversarial process.”