TAP, Portugal’s main airline, is the riskiest asset in Portuguese politics. With the pandemic, the state has had to inject 3,200 million euros to perpetuate the airline’s existence, in an operation that is not very popular with the population. Today, a few months after the privatization, the deputies are examining the company within the framework of a parliamentary commission of inquiry. From the start of the first sessions, complaints of political interference in the company put the government into a middle ground.
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Last Tuesday, for nearly seven hours, Christine Ormeyer Wiedner, the airline’s CEO, appeared before the deputies. He complained that the political and media pressures on the company did not allow him to focus on running the business. For example, Liberal Initiative MP Bernardo Blanco denounced an email exchange between the company’s CEO and then-Secretary of State for Infrastructure, Hugo Mendez, in February 2022. The messages showed the government’s efforts to change the regular diet. TAP flight between Maputo and Lisbon to allow the President of the Republic to travel at the expense of other passengers on the flight. Rationale: “Marcelo [Rebelo de Sousa] He is our greatest political ally, but if his mood changes, all is lost. One sentence from you against TAP or the government and the rest of the country pays against us. He is our main political ally, but he can also become our worst nightmare.
The President of the Republic is very popular among the Portuguese, and is popularly known as the “Chief of Affection”. Ourmières-Widener, however, did not modify the flight, and after the affair was made public, the Presidency was quick to state publicly that the change request did not come from its office.
A meeting between the Socialist Party’s parliamentary group, government advisers and the chief executive of TAP was also announced the day before his public appearance in parliament last January. The case worried parliamentarians because one of the deputies present in the commission of inquiry – Carlos Pereira, from the Socialist Party – was also present at this preparatory meeting, which could confirm a conflict of interest.
Ourmières-Widener is launched without notice from the finance ministers, Fernando Medina, and infrastructure, João Galamba, in early March, after Medina had earlier tried to have him resign. The government claims this is a fair dismissal given alleged irregularities in the payment to Alexandra Reis, a former CEO who left the company in February 2022 due to a mismatch with the CEO, and was awarded €500,000 in compensation.
About five months after leaving TAP, the government named Alexandra Reis head of the NAV aeronautics company. She was there for a short time because in November she was appointed Secretary of State to the Exchequer, which depended on the Exchequer.
The value of the compensation, which had been kept secret for several months, became a national controversy when the paper was published on Christmas Eve 2022 morning mail revealed. Alexandra Reis ended up resigning from the government, as did then-Infrastructure Minister Pedro Nuno Santos – who shared political control of TAP with the Ministry of Finance. Later it became known that the Minister of Infrastructure himself agreed to compensate Alexandra Reis 500,000 euros.
The TAP track ended in the debate between the two candidates best suited to succeed Antonio Costa: current Finance Minister Fernando Medina and former Minister of Infrastructure, Pedro Nuno Santos. Fernando Medina is closer to the line followed by Prime Minister Antonio Costa, while Pedro Nuno Santos presents himself as a representative of the left wing of the Socialist Party, which is viewed favorably by left-wing parties, such as the Communist Party or the Left Bloc.
Despite the instability caused by the political management, on the business front, the company recorded a profit of 65.6 million euros in 2022 and adheres to the restructuring plan presented by the Portuguese government in Brussels. However, although the intention to separate Ourmières-Widener has been known for more than a month, we still do not know when it will take effect and when it will leave the company. And his successor has already been chosen: Luis Rodriguez, the former president of Azores-Sata Airlines.
The airline should be privatized in the coming months under terms yet to be determined. At the moment, the interest of the IAG Group – of which Iberia is a part – and the Air France-KLM group and the German Lufthansa group are known. Regarding Iberia’s interest in TAP, the head of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, said at the Spanish-Portuguese Summit in Lanzarote that although it is “not the right of the Spanish government to take a position” on an issue involving a private company, “we welcome anything that works to strengthen ties with Our Portuguese friends.
Before the crisis caused by the pandemic, the Portuguese government already owned half of the airline, with wholly private management. The company was privatized by the former centre-right government of Pedro Passos Coelho – in a coalition between the Social Democratic Party and CDS – when the government was already in power. The acquisition of half of the company in February 2016 became one of the first actions of the first socialist government of Antonio Costa, seen as a rapprochement with left-wing partners that made it possible to give the necessary parliamentary majority to the socialist. Formation of the government.
