TAP: Neeleman team received “bonuses and salaries worth millions”

Top brass members of TAP may have received around €1.2 million in bonuses and €19 million in salaries through the provision of services to Atlantic Gateway at the time that Brazilian-American airline mogul David Neeleman ran the airline.

Atlantic Gateway was the private consortium that held 61% of TAP’s capital when the airline was in private hands between 2015 and 2020. In 2019 TAP lost €100 million.
According to Negócios, which had access to documents showing bonus and other payouts over the past 10 years, of the 33 management figures that were on the list of beneficiaries, only five are identified as having had “payouts AFTER having left the company via other contracts”. All were part of Neeleman’s team.
In addition to Neeleman – Humberto Pedrosa, David Pedrosa and Maximilian Urbahn received a total of €4.3 million, each one “through a service provision contract with Atlantic Gateway”, states the document.
These contracts started on January 1, 2016, shortly after having taken up executive roles at TAP, and the last payments, dated July 2020, were made one month after the State had taken over the airline and injected around €1.2Bn to keep it in the air. In other words bonuses were paid out despite the airline showing negative results.
Sources close to the shareholders have denied that that they has received any bonus payouts or salaries AFTER they had left the airline and explained that the contracts in question were to pay their salaries since they didn’t receive them directly from the airline company.
But the payment of €75,000 per month to the three members of Atlantic Gateway – Neeleman, Humberto and David Pedrosa “were listed on TAP’s costs through a debit” to the main shareholder states one of the sources.
“They opted for this solution which is used in other companies too”, the source added. As to the amount in question, the €4.3 million referred to the total amount of salaries over four years that they had been at TAP.