TAP lawyer in bonus row

An ex-legal director of TAP who joined the airline in May 2018 on a salary of €9,500 a month, was awarded a bonus of €19,570 in 2019; a year in which the company posted a €118 million loss.

Stephanie Sá da Silva, the wife of Portugal’s Minister of Finances, Fernando Medina, had tendered her resignation from scandal ridden airline TAP when her husband was appointed to a ministerial post to avoid any clash of interest.
Stephanie Sá da Silva, who belongs to Portugal’s political party/ministerial ‘aristocracy’ being the daughter of Jaime Silva who served as the Minister of Agriculture, Rural Development and Fisheries during the first José Sócrates government, announced on her LinkedIn page in March 2022 that she was resigning, saying: “For reasons that are public, I have today informed (March 30, 2022) the Executive Commission of the cessation of my responsibilities.”
The bonus in May 2019 was the equivalent of two monthly salaries and awarded just a year after she had joined TAP reported Correio da Manhã on Saturday, March 18.
The wife of the former mayor of Lisbon was invited to join the legal department in May 2018 by the private shareholder Atlantic Gateway.
The newspaper Correio da Manhã reports that Stéphanie Sá da Silva joined TAP three years after having been part of the law firm Cuatrecasas where Senior Partner André Gonçalves Pereira had been a legal advisor to airline mogul David Neeleman in the privatisation of the airline in 2015.
When Neeleman left TAP after its renationalisation in 2020, Ms. Sá da Silva stayed on with the airline until May 2022 and resigned on the same date that her husband was invited to become part of the António Costa government.
The mayor’s wife is currently a legal partner at DLA Piper in Lisbon where it states on the law firm’s website that she “concentrates her practice in the aviation sector and in the area of corporate law. With more than 17 years of experience, she has advised on various corporate matters, mergers and acquisitions, investment projects, restructuring operations, privatisations and commercial agreements, in several sectors of activity.
Her practice has also been focussed on the air transport sector. Among others, she has advised on commercial, litigation and regulatory matters that are specific to this industry. In the past four years, she was General Counsel at TAP Air Portugal. The lawyer has also won the Inspira Law and Diversity Award 2023 for the third year running.