The leader of the Liberal Initiative (IL) accused this Saturday the PS and the PSD of taking care of the state apparatus and questioned why Santarém is an option for the new airport.
“It seems that the two usual parties decide the fate of the country in four years, between four walls, as if they were the owners of the country. Are not. They only have the responsibility of the country to be in the state it is in”, accused João Cotrim Figueiredo.
In that sense, he added that “there are two parties that believe they own the system, that have taken charge of the state apparatus and that believe they can make these decisions alone” when “they are technically incompetent.”
João Cotrim Figueiredo reacted to journalists this Saturday morning in Viseu, following the Government’s announcement on Friday of the creation of an independent technical commission to study the location of the new airport.
“They couldn’t even say what are the location options that this independent technical committee will look at. They just say that Santarém will be one of them and I ask exactly why,” he asked.
In his opinion, there are two hypotheses, one is that “Santarém is more than 75 kilometers from Lisbon, or at least from the Lisbon airport, and may be outside the exclusive airport assigned to ANA” and that is one of the reasons.
“Or it is a way to return the generous support of the shareholders of the Barraqueiro group to PS. I would like to know which of the two reasons put the Santarém option on the table, more or less unexpectedly,” he said.
This political official assumed that “this is not a statement of suspicion” and added that if “once again” an independent technical commission will be formed to study and decide on a location that can be done quickly”.
Cotrim de Figueiredo said that he hopes that this commission “is effectively independent and that it does not depend on partisan interests, nor on real estate in the areas where the towns will be studied” because “the country cannot wait,” he defended.
The IL leader recalled that “it is 50 years of delay in an airport decision” and now, “there are another 15 months of the new evaluation, it is 15 days just to approve the independent technical commission and more than a month passed between the first and the second meeting.
“This is a rhythm at which the PS and the PSD work, so bipartisanship in Portugal, that’s all,” he pointed out, while saying, “without any false modesty” that “if the IL took charge of this dossier It would have been resolved many, many months ago.”
Without specifying a specific location for the new airport, since “it is a technical problem”, he limited himself to defending that if the party he leads already had “the technical conclusions of this work, it would have been solved a long, long time ago”. long time”.
João Cotrim Figueiredo said that he will demand that the commission’s work “be complete enough to allow the decision to be final and quick”, without going back to places already studied, because that “would be a waste of time”.
“I remember, these studies we are talking about have already cost the public treasury, over the years, more than 70 million euros. I don’t know how much it will cost, I know it will cost another 15 months, it will surely cost much more money, and Portugal is still undecided on the location of the airport that will serve the Lisbon area,” he said. he concluded.
Source: Observadora
