TIAGO PETINGA/LUSA
Access to the donation list will only have the values as public data. Donor name and document numbers will be crossed out.
Change in financing parties and political campaigns: It is no longer known who the financiers are.
The Political Accounts and Financing Entity (ECPF) continues to identify people internally (it has this oversight function).
But, indicates the , the names of donors are no longer public data. The values will be there in the list, but the names will be scratched; personal document numbers will also be crossed out.
This change was made because “some parties and candidacies” invoked “the General Data Protection Regulation to refuse to send donor identification details to ECFP”, explains the entity.
And there is another reason: “They claimed that the banks They refused to provide information about the identification of the donors.”
The Access to Administrative Documents Committee gave its opinion on the decision: “The association of donations to a certain political party or candidacy is, as a rule, likely to reveal, directly or indirectly, the opinions or donor’s political beliefs“.
This change, among other consequences, will slow down the work of journalists on party financing.
Fabian Figueiredo, from Bloco de Esquerda, said this Thursday that it is “unacceptable” that journalists no longer have this access. The party wants to hear the two entities involved in Parliament.
If Portugal does not allow this scrutiny, it will be a “unique case”, warned Rui Tavares, from Livre.
Pedro Delgado Alves said that the PS will deliver to the Assembly of the Republic a “small change” to the party financing law. The proposal is that donations to parties be “public and accessible”.
The PS has a legal doubt that results from an “express provision in the law that party and campaign financing must be public”. The deputy reinforced that “there is no time to waste” on this matter.
The president of the National Anti-Corruption Mechanism, José Mouraz Lopes, admitted on the radio: “We were caught, I would say, a little bit of surprise for the news.”
“It seems to us that there is a contradiction between the demands for transparency at a global level, at a European level, and which, obviously, our law has always established, in the sense that all financing made to political parties must be disclosed”, he commented, even if he has not yet read the opinion.
Margarida Salema, former president of the Accounts and Political Financing Entity, reacted clearly: “It is an idea that can only be in the head of someone who don’t have the slightest idea of what happens in political financing”.
Margarida remembers that legislation in Portugal does not prohibit the disclosure of donors’ names. “And it even points in the opposite direction, towards publicity. Donations are not anonymous! Portuguese law is clear”, he reinforces.
The former leader of Entidade das Contas sees here a “restriction serious and illegal”.
