Government replaces Parpública president and appoints new team members

The Portuguese government has replaced the president of Parpública, the State-owned holding company responsible for running its public-owned companies.

According to ECO online, it has emerged that Joaquim Cadete, an economics and finance academic and course director at the Católica Lisbon School of Economics, will replace the outgoing president of Parpública, José Realinho de Matos.

With a Master’s degree in Monetary and Financial Economics from ISEG and a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the Institute of Social Sciences, Joaquim Cadete has worked at several foreign investment banks, such as ABN Amro, Citigroup Global Markets and Rockbridge Advisers. In Portugal, he was a financial director of Banif Banco de Investimento, between 2017 and 2018, and a non-executive director of Euronext Securities Porto.

João Pinhão returns to the position of financial director of Parpública, which he held between 2020 and 2023. He had left to briefly be the CFO of Companhia das Lezírias.

The new team will also include João Ferreira, who had led Operational Excellence for Global Service Delivery at Mercer Portugal, and Cristina Carvalho, a lawyer at Estamo – Participações Imobiliárias and former senior partner at the law firm CMS Rui Pena, Arnaut. There will be one more appointment which has yet to be finalised.

The new administration is expected to take office between the end of August and the beginning of September, according to ECO from the same source. The Ministry of Finance, which is the government ministry responsible for Parpública, has declined to comment as to the reasons it carried out the board reshuffle. A general meeting will be held on August 30 to approve Parpública’s accounts.

The government decided to remove the current administration at Parpública on Thursday.

However, according to business daily Negócios, sources suggested it may have been because of a “reactive rather than proactive stance” to government policy decisions regarding public-owned companies, particularly the paper products distribution company Inapa which had begged the government for a €12 million cash loan to stave off bankruptcy – a request which fell on deaf ears.