The Budget and Treasury Committee approved this Wednesday the hearing of the Court of Auditors and the Resolution Fund on the audit of Novo Banco, but made those of the Banco de Portugal, Novo Banco and the Government unfeasible.
The deputies of the Budget and Finance Committee (COF) unanimously approved the request presented by the PSD for the hearing of the Court of Accounts (TdC) and the Resolution Fund (FdR), on the audit of the Court of Accounts public financing and management of Novo Bancoappointed the social democratic deputy Duarte Pacheco to Lusa.
“The parties considered the audit important and provided important elements on this matter,” he said, adding that “hearings should take place in early September.”
However, the PS failed the hearing of the Bank of Portugal, the Government and the administration of Novo Banco, with the favorable votes of all the parties represented in the COF.
In the request presented by the PSD, the parliamentary group justified the request for hearings, after the disclosure of the conclusions of the TdC audit, with “the manifest public interest at stake“.
“From the data released we can conclude what the PSD had been saying for a long time, that is, that Novo Banco maximized capital calls, valuing assets well below their valueby not having the public entities -Government, Banco de Portugal and Resolution Fund- guaranteeing the necessary supervision to defend the public interest in the field of capital injections in the Bank”, they justified.
The PSD underlined that “a particularly worrying conclusion is that the competent public authorities have failed to fulfill their responsibility to safeguard the public interest“.
A TdC audit of Novo Banco’s management, released last week, concludes that the State and the BdP have not ensured a “effective public control” in Novo Banco, by not safeguarding the “minimization of the use of public financial support” to the bank.
The court also concludes that the management of Novo Banco with state financing “did not safeguard the public interest”, having identified “risks of conflict of interest” in the operations carried out and “avoidable practices” that weighed down public financing.
In addition, the TdC warns of the possible need for a new injection of capital to ensure the viability of Novo Banco, aggravated by the negative impact of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and foresees that the Resolution Fund must be “managing the debt derived from the resolution of the BES” for 35 years.
Source: Observadora
