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The finance minister will meet with the prime minister tonight at the prime minister’s official residence. The news is being promoted by RTP and has since been confirmed by Expresso.
The meeting takes place at the end of a day when Mário Centeno was under fire due to the transfer of 850 million euros to Novo Banco.
In the morning, the Minister of Finance was in Parliament, where António Costa and the entire Government were involved in the decision to advance the tranche of 850 million euros to the Resolution Fund, to inject it into Novo Banco. Mário Centeno said that he did nothing “by default” of António Costa and that everything that is done is decided by the Government in the Council of Ministers.
The transfer to Novo Banco is registered in the State Budget for 2020 and it is this inscription that guarantees Finance that it should be fulfilled. In the Ministry of Finance, it is recalled that the Budget is a document of the entire Government and that the transfer does not contribute anything new to what has been done. You have a scheduled day and a defined maximum amount.
This was the line of defense of Finance, both by Mário Centeno and by Ricardo Mourinho Félix, Undersecretary of State and Finance, who do not understand how the transfer of the audit that must be carried out under Law 15/2019 is made dependent . . A law of the Assembly of the Republic that requires that a “special” audit be carried out within 30 days after the injection of public capital in a banking institution. Mário Centeno said it in the morning as Ricardo Mourinho Félix did, in the afternoon also in Parliament: this is not a “prior” audit, but it is carried out after the capital injection has been carried out.
Now it was António Costa who made the transfer of 850 million euros dependent on an audit (after saying otherwise, which was foreseen in the State Budget), being implicit in the response he gives in the last biweekly debate to Catarina Martins , which concerned the ongoing audit ending in July. The same to what Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was referring to, remembering that it should have ended in May and that without knowing its content, the transfer should not have been made.
It was this intervention by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, with the Prime Minister at his side, who started all the developments this Wednesday and who led the Minister of Finance to go to São Bento to speak with António Costa.
During the afternoon, Centeno was the target of all criticism from the opposition and with a silent PS in defense of his minister. The Socialists would only come out to defend Centeno after the debate ended and in response to Rui Rio, who called for the resignation of the finance minister.
