Prime Minister says TAP privatisation off the table without Lisbon remaining a hub and retaining strategic routes
The Prime Minister Luís Montenegro spelled out this Thursday that without retaining TAP’s hub in Portugal and the operation of strategic routes (to Brazil and Africa) to the country being guaranteed, the Government “will take over the operation” of the airline.
In response to a question from the PCP Communist Party MP, Paulo Raimundo, as part of a debate with the Prime Minister in the Portuguese parliament, Luís Montenegro assured, as he had already done so last Friday, that, although the Government’s vision for TAP “is that of privatising the airline with private management and private capital”, the government will not do so without ensuring that these two conditions are guaranteed.
“We are not going to privatise TAP just because we have a notion that the market would work better and so would the company, if it were privatised,” said the Government leader.
Montenegro also said that the Government intended to replicate what happened in 2015, when TAP was privatised, he said, “taking the necessary guarantees”. The prime minister said the operation safeguarded Portugal’s public and strategic interest in TAP.
The prime minister also criticised the previous socialist governments, noting that the PS had made an “agreement with the Left Bloc and PCP parties, and because of that, nationalised TAP, injecting €3,2Bn into the airline, and when it later won an absolute majority, it had a free hand to recover what (the Government) had done in 2015”.
Meanwhile, the Brazilian airline Azul founded by David Neeleman, which made an agreement to loan TAP €90 million in 2016, has hired a law firm in Portugal to negotiate the debt.
In a response sent to the Lusa agency, Azul Linhas Aéreas clarifies that “with the move towards a possible privatisation of TAP, the sanitising of the TAP group company that signed the loan and the debt guarantees, Azul has hired a law firm in Portugal to ensure that the guarantees are made effective or that the debt is paid in advance”.
The Brazilian airline, founded by David Neeleman, a former shareholder of TAP, also stresses that it is seeking “an understanding to remedy the situation in an amicable and commercial way, not ruling out the possibility of taking tougher actions if there is no agreement with the Portuguese company”.
At issue is a debt contracted by TAP in 2016, a year after the Government approved the sale of 61% of TAP’s share capital to the Atlantic Gateway consortium comprising US businessman David Neeleman and Portuguese businessman Humberto Pedrosa – one of the two finalists in the privatisation process of the Portuguese airline. The other candidate, Brazilian tycoon Germán Efromovich was not successful in his bid for TAP.
“The Company clarifies that it made a loan of €90 million, along with another €30 million from the Portuguese government, to help the liquidity of the airline, which was going through a challenging financial time,” a source from Azul told Lusa.