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“Partial and biased”. This is how Álvaro Santos Pereira, former Minister of Economy of the PSD / CDS of the Pedro Passos Coelho Government, described the report of the Court of Accounts that attributes to him having injured the State by 9.25 million euros after the renegotiation of the contract. of economic counterparts with Airbus Military – due to the supply of the tactical transport aircraft C-295 (which replaced the old Aviocar).
Called to Parliament by the Left Bloc, the former minister said in his opening speech that the report of the Court of Accounts “there was no real contradiction”, alleging that “the people involved in the negotiation could not defend themselves.” And he suggested that they call the legal advisers of the ministry, but also the private ones, PLMJ lawyers, including former PSD minister Nuno Morais Sarmento, to explain why there was no illegality (and the PLMJ’s opinion was sent to the deputies). ).
Álvaro Santos Pereira, however, went further in statements to the Defense Commission: “My honor and good name have been affected and I intend to see how I will address this issue judicially. ” João Vasconcelos, a deputy for the Esquerda Bloco, accused the former Social Democratic minister of “contempt” by the Court of Accounts, but Santos Pereira reacted: “I want to clear my name and thank the Bloco for calling me. But this type of report from the Court of Auditors diminishes my faith in the institutions that should be independent in Portugal“.
The minister’s hearing was requested after the publication, at the beginning of August, of a report by the Court of Accounts in which it indicated that it had harmed the State by 9.25 million euros in 2012, but also said that the current Minister of Defense , João Gomes Cravinho, made a “disadvantageous negotiation” when he transformed those counterparts into an aircraft maintenance contract.
In the initial intervention, Álvaro Santos Pereira was very critical of the model of economic counterparts for the purchase of military material (which is no longer used), describing them as “dysfunctional”, but also “imaginary or manifestly exaggerated”, existing only so that public opinion would accept investments in war equipment.
Regarding the specific case of the renegotiation of the counterparties analyzed by the Court of Accounts, Santos Pereira justified having managed to make Airbus Military investments “focused” on strengthening “the aeronautical cluster in the country. One of the projects generated more than 200 direct jobs and 800 indirect “- Caetano Aeronautic. And he affirmed that the company abdicated 160 million euros of compensation that it considered due.
In an audit in 2017, the TC had already written that “the interests of the State were not duly served” by Álvaro Santos Pereira’s ministry, in the renegotiation of the counterparty contract signed in 2012, at a time when the company selling the EADS / CASA equipment – later acquired by Airbus Defense & Space -, had met only 31% of the 460 million euros counterparts (the same amount that planes cost). In view of the supplier’s non-compliance, the Government decided to apply the sanctions. Except that, according to the Court of Accounts, the Passos Coelho Ministry of Economy did not do so in accordance with the law. “Illegality” can be read in the report, since it is established that the penalty for non-compliance must be 15% -as stipulated by law- and not 10%, as it ended up happening.
Two years later, in the report published in August, the TC calculated the amount in which the State could have been harmed: “If the penalty for definitive non-compliance had been set, in 2012, according to the parameter that results from the law (15 %), the compensation agreed at the end would have been, with a high degree of probability, 27.75 million euros instead of 18.5 million euros, that is, 9.25 million euros “, the judges wrote, admitting that “the illegality and the damage found could be a source of political, civil and criminal responsibility”, although the DCIAP has ruled out the existence of a crime and the TC only pronounces on the economic aspect.
