Pedro Nuno Santos was already heard in the Central Directorate of Criminal Investigation and Criminal Action (DCIAP) in the process that investigates alleged crimes in the privatization of TAP, in 2015. The investigation was opened after a stake to the socialist Public Ministry itself, as Minister of Infrastructure, together with Fernando Medina, who was then Minister of Finance. According to the Observer, Medina has not yet been heard from.
The information about Pedro Nuno’s hearing was provided by Correio da Manhã and confirmed by Observador. According to El Observador, Fernando Medina was not heard in the context of the same process. The two ministers had sent a complaint to the Public Ministry after a TAP audit found evidence of crime in the privatization of the airline, a conclusion already reached in the IGF report on TAP published last September.
This is the purchase of the company by the consortium formed by David Neeleman and Humberto Pedrosa, Atlantic Gateway, which will have been financed with a loan of 226 million dollars made by Airbus. In exchange, TAP purchased 53 aircraft from Airbus.
When Pedro Nuno Santos appeared before the commission of inquiry into TAP, he was no longer a minister: he had resigned at the beginning of 2023, after compensation from the company’s former administrator, Alexandra Reis. At that hearing, the socialist said that the TAP internal audit he had in his hands was “serious enough to ignore it and continue holding hearings as if we didn’t know that there is an audit that says we may all have been deceived.” “And I tell everyone: that TAP was deceived, that the PSD government was deceived, that the country was deceived.”
Pedro Nuno Santos described the conclusions of this audit as “alarming.” The matter had already been in the Public Ministry since February 2023 and, in September of this year, the Attorney General’s Office told the Observer that it was also in possession of the IGF report. “The same (IGF report) was sent to the DCIAP where after its analysis it was determined to link the document to an investigation that is currently being investigated in that department and that, being public, originated from a participation presented by, in its moment, Ministers of Infrastructure and Housing and Minister of Finance,” the PGR said at the time.
A “complex operation” that evaded the law and a “simulated” business The IGF’s suspicions about TAP
Source: Observadora
