The alleged contradiction between members of the Government on the existence of a legal opinion that justifies the resignation of the executive president and president of TAP results from a “purely semantic” issue, said the Minister of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers on Tuesday. Mariana Vieira da Silva, who was one of the three members of the Government involved in this controversy, went so far as to explain to RTP 3, in the Tudo é Economía Program, that she was not contradicted by the Minister of Finance when Fernando Medina said that there was no opinion that she herself would have mentioned a day before.

Layoffs at TAP. The opinion that did not exist, the minutes that the Government denied and that were given by those who own 1% of the company

“There is no formal opinion, but there is a set of documents that are produced by the Government’s legal competence center,” JurisApp. “It is a purely semantic question in this supposed divergence,” she stressed. And he adds that when he used the word “opinion” he was responding to a question from Iniciativa Liberal deputy Guimarães Pinto, who specifically referred to an opinion.

Mariana Vieira da Silva was the first member of the Executive to provide clarification on this issue after António Costa and Ana Catarina Mendes evaded the question on Sunday, the day the PS was 50 years old.

Government does not explain contradictions of opinion (from TAP) that it does not have. Costa attacks Montenegro, Ana Catarina Mendes admits mistakes

There is no fundamental difference in question. Government will enter documents requested by the CPI

Still on the issue of contradictions between ministers, Vieira da Silva admits that he could have used the expression “legal support instead of legal opinion, and if that would have saved all these hours of television, he certainly could have. If a fundamental divergence is at stake here and something that endangers the duties of the Government, accountability, I sincerely believe not.

For Mariana Vieira da Silva, the most relevant note is that the “Government understood, in the first request of the ICC (Parliamentary Investigation Commission), not to deliver a set of documents”, alleging that they referred to events outside the temporal scope. of the parliamentary investigation into TAP, in this case the dismissal of Christine Ourmières-Widener and Manuel Beja, which occurred this year.

Faced with the new request – which is an insistence from the first – the minister says that the Government will respond “in the next few days, delivering the set of documents and safeguarding what is necessary to safeguard its interests.” Which means the items are likely to be classified as sensitive.

But “one thing is the facts that led the government to decide to fire the general director of Top and another thing is the legal procedure that later develops. And this is what we are talking about and what is being investigated at the CPI. And the “Government wants to clearly say that it is not hindering the work of the CPI in any way and will send the documentation in the coming days.”

In addition to this reason invoked in the response of the Ministries of Infrastructure and Finance to the CPI, Mariana Vieira da Silva explains why she argued with a second dimension to justify the Government’s refusal to deliver the aforementioned documents. Legal input is at stake for a process that will escalate into a dispute between TAP’s former chief executive.

“When a legal dispute is announced in the courts and I see that one of the main stakeholders in this matter is the lawyers of the former CEO of TAP, I feel the duty to say that it is up to me to defend the interest. of the State at this time, sharing the documents that the CPI deems necessary.

Mariana Vieira da Silva was also surprised by the fact that some issues gained a certain centrality in the political debate that they objectively do not have. And he questioned that if “having a whole discussion around the word opinion or contribution or support is something that I must confess is completely beyond me and that this discussion reaches the point of saying that so-and-so lied, it is something that I do.” I don’t understand”.