Threats, robberies and spies: the TAP case puts the Portuguese infrastructure minister on the line again

João Galamba he has been active in Portuguese politics since taking over the Infrastructure portfolio on January 4. On the 17th of that month, he held a meeting with the first director of the public airline TAP. It was on the eve of the session of the parliamentary investigative committee on the company’s management, where suspicions of attempts to pressure the management were raised. Both the meeting and the documents and notes surrounding it created a snowball that exploded on April 26, when Galamba fired his adviser. Frederico Pinheiro. He went to his office to collect his belongings and, as the minister and his cabinet claim, attacked four people with the aim of “stealing” his computer with confidential data. The intelligence service stepped in to recover the computer, and not long after, after pressure from the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Galamba resigned. In an unexpected twist, Prime Minister António Costa refused to resign, triggering the biggest recent institutional crisis.

Pinheiro appeared before the commission on Wednesday to present his version of the facts, in which he assured that he was the attacked, not the aggressor. Moreover, he assured that Galamba threatened him with “two blows with his fists” in the telephone cancellation. «[Después] I was the one who called the police,” he said, to defend himself from a “surreal situation”: he was locked up in the ministry. A few hours later, he handed over his computer to an agent of the Intelligence Service (SIS), after copying personal documents and mentioned minutes of the meetings.Pinheiro also claimed that it was not he, but the minister who was hiding the information.

And yesterday, the committee before which Galamba appeared in advance tried to clarify that. As for the meeting, the minister insisted on his version: He did not conceal or “obstruct or pressure in any way” the former TAP CEO to agree on the issues. And he insisted that these types of meetings are “regular” given the state of the airline. The minute-by-minute detail of what happened on the night of April 26 was more relevant: Galamba repeated his version of events and the accusations against Frederico Pinheiro. After learning about the attacks, he said, he telephoned the Minister of Justice, while the Judiciary police had already been informed by his advisers. However, he admitted for the first time that he called the Minister of Internal Administration, responsible for SIS. However, he could not answer the key question of whether he himself sought the intervention of intelligence officers (for political purposes).

The more that is known, the further the solution to the case that Rebelo sees as crucial for the “transparency of institutions” appears.