In Portugal, political promiscuity and corruption are really from another planet. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Politicians, judges and journalists are often one and the same thing, they all seem to belong to the same family, and often they do.
And so 600 million euros, which “apparently” became 485 million, were stolen from the Portuguese to make some corrupt, filthy millionaires, but the reaction of the Portuguese to all this theft is the same as always, to look to the other way.
The megalomaniacal thefts of public money that happen every day, amounting to billions and billions, as if we were talking about peanuts, are done brazenly in Portugal, and when someone questions something, as happened to an honest Portuguese journalist who dared to exercise her noble profession by making a TV news report denouncing the corrupt and their criminal dealings with the taxpayers’ money, she immediately suffers reprisals to the point of being fired from the TV station where she works. Can you believe that this journalist was even banned from entering the premises of the TV station? No, I’m not talking about China! I’m not talking about North Korea! I’m not talking about Cuba! I’m talking about a sh*thole in the EU, a dictatorship called Portugal!
I feel so bad for the fired journalist, she didn’t do anything wrong! Quite the contrary.
In any other country, this would have provoked at least an immediate wave of indignation and solidarity from his fellow journalists, as well as from all the other Portuguese media and the general population, because this is something extremely serious and dangerous, we are talking about killing the free press, we are talking about killing democracy, we are talking about dictatorship!
Corruption and thievery in Portugal is not only caused by politicians, as one might think, but it is rather something that is inherent to the bad character and callousness of most of the Portuguese population, crossing all levels of society, for some reason there has been no reaction of anger or even simple indignation from Portuguese civil society. Just a small petition on the Internet that got the meager amount of 2156 web signatures!
Better than me saying more is to read the following post and draw your own conclusions about Portugal and the Portuguese “democratic way of life”.
The following article is a translation (mostly MT). You can find the link to the original website at the end of it.
SIRESP and other businesses of Costa & Sócrates
The Integrated System of Emergency and Safety Networks (SIRESP), in addition to being of almost no use in many fires, including those of 2017 – which resulted in the largest combined burned area in all of Europe and more than a hundred fatalities –,
it was awarded, mysteriously and jointly, in 2006, by Sócrates, while Prime Minister, and Costa, then his Minister of Internal Administration, for a price around 500 percent higher than its real value.
This is according to what several experts revealed to journalist Ana Leal, in reports broadcast by TVI.
How, for 15 years, did taxpayers lose 600 million euros on something that was of little use to them?
The current Minister of Internal Affairs, Eduardo Cabrita, “apparatchik” and typical accomplice of the PS apparatus – both of Sócrates & Costa, and of whoever comes next –, is negotiating to extend the SIRESP contract for more than 18 months, transition period of public-private partnership services to the State. On June 30, 2021, the contract ends and the Government is trying, without planning and on its knees, as is its custom, therefore with little negotiating leverage with the private partner, to cover the fire season and postpone the resolution of a problem that was born crooked and irresolvable from the beginning.
Just as Sócrates managed to remove Manuela Moura Guedes from TVI, in 2009, while he was prime minister.
– had it not been for her to unravel her cases only now revealed after the statute of limitations –, so did the journalist Ana Leal, as she herself revealed in the weekly ‘Sol’,
made public Costa’s pressure on TVI’s management to fire her. This happened due to Ana Leal’s investigations into how Costa made 600 million taxpayers disappear from SIRESP.
We now know, unfortunately only after most of the prescribed crimes of corruption, what Sócrates had to hide from the TVI reports. Does Costa have anything to hide that would not be convenient to be revealed on TVI from the end of 2020, when Anal Leal had to resign from that television station?
Contrary to what the name implies, SIRESP, in reality, has not been used either for emergencies or for our security. In addition to the already mentioned lack of results in the fires, according to its contract indicates in section 17, no one to whom the State pays so much is held responsible in several obvious cases of emergency and security, such as natural cataclysms, explosions or earthquakes. Not even in the event of severe lightning or flooding does SIRESP have to intervene!
That is, we pay hundreds of millions of euros for an emergency service that is not obliged to work in various critical situations!
Of course, in general, model contracts for the provision of services, for example in the case of shows, invoke such reasons of force majeure, but this makes little sense when it comes to a service paid specifically to be able to act effectively in emergencies.
The SIRESP contract is, therefore, more or less as if we took out expensive health insurance in which, if we got sick, the insurance company had no obligations to us.
Are there people so unintelligent that they sign and pay – expensive – contracts like that? Yes: the PS rulers, when it comes to our money. Are they just unintelligent…or worse? What is SIRESP used for and what has it been used for? If not to ensure our safety in so many emergencies,
why did Sócrates and Costa pay so much of our money?
We don’t win anything. And them?
From the media censored through dismissals under pressure from the PS, we will hardly hear any more responses.
Ana Leal, remember, was forced to resign from TVI in September 2020, after on the 10th of March of that same year the management of the station suspended the program she was leading and, a fortnight later, dissolved the team of journalistic investigation he led.
Interestingly, the overly flattering Polígrafo/SIC, on March 4, 2020, still insisted that it was “false” that a true journalist like Ana Leal, only subservient to the truth, was forced to resign.
The journalist discovered that, in the beginning, SIRESP was awarded by Costa & Sócrates for 485 million euros, but in reality it should have only cost 80 million euros, the value at which the experts evaluated it.
According to the author of the first study on SIRESP, Almiro de Oliveira, the money paid by Costa therefore represented “a multiple that cannot be justified”. The president of the Telecommunications Institute, Carlos Salema, also stated that such a figure “is not normal at all”.
Interestingly, the prosecutor Cândida Almeida, of course, dismissed the case, without the DCIAP deigning to hear these two important witnesses revealed by Leal.
Therefore, from the Justice equally controlled, with the leadership appointed by the PS, we also did not obtain – nor will we obtain in the short term – any answer about SIRESP.
This, as seen again with Sócrates, free of so many crimes of corruption, meanwhile prescribed, magically and suddenly, by a ruling of the Constitutional Court, with the involvement of a former president and a current president of that court, both appointed by the PS,
as we found out from journalist Sandra Felgueiras, from RTP. This is one of the few true journalists who has not yet been “dismissed”,
despite being repeatedly prevented from properly investigating both Sócrates’ past affairs and Costa’s current ones.
It does not seem to us that it was by chance that Sandra Felgueiras was silenced on “Friday at 9”, in September 2019, by the director of RTP, Maria Flor Pedroso, a cousin of Costa. Flor Pedroso postponed a program with very serious revelations about the concession of our lithium in Montalegre by Secretary of State João Galamba until after the October 2019 legislative elections.
A deal worth 500 million euros with a company that was only two days old, Lusorecursos, owned by Jorge Costa Oliveira, a friend of António Costa.
According to the Minister of the Environment, Matos Fernandes, stated on RTP on April 30, 2021, this contract will now be revoked in August, due to “lack of professionalism” by Lusorecursos. Would it be if it weren’t for the investigation of the journalist Felgueiras? If the company lacked professionalism, how was the government so quick to grant a friend of Costa such a deal? Significantly, another friend of Costa’s, Lacerda de Machado, was also involved in the SIRESP and TAP negotiations.
The journalists that Sócrates, Costa and the ministers coming from JS value, as Orban does, are not brave professionals like Felgueiras or Leal, but people like Nicolau “do Laço” Santos, who is now going to be chairman of the board of directors of RTP. This, according to the newspaper ‘Observador’, already has an injunction filed against him by Coelho da Silva, in April 2021, which claims, of course, that whenever this PS is involved, there are irregularities in recruitment.
Let us recall that previously the same Nicolau, after a “brilliant” career on ‘Expresso’ praising Costa & Sócrates, even inviting false UN experts to defend far-fetched theses that benefited them, was rewarded and appointed by Costa as chairman of the board of the administration of the Lusa agency. There, whenever the ‘Financial Times’ newspaper contained the slightest piece of news favorable to the government, Lusa immediately issued large “press releases”. However, when the same newspaper exposed devastating counter-arguments about the government, it imposed the corkage law.
It’s people like that that this Costa government likes.
Could it be that, with Nicolau Santos at the head of RTP, Sandra Felgueiras could intend to do reports that undermine other businesses of friends of Costa – and that involve our millions?
More related news
Petition for effective press freedom on TVI
To: Portuguese people.
Hon. Mr President of the Republic
Excellent Hon. Members of the Parliamentary Committee on Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees
Hon. Madam Attorney General of the Republic
Hon. President of the Journalist Professional License Commission
Excellent Hon. Mr Ombudsman
Excellent Administrators of Prisa, the group that owns TVI
Freedom of the Press is too precious a commodity. The signatory citizens, under the terms of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, demand that the State guarantees the right of everyone to be informed, regardless of the more collusion of party or business interests, or even the personal promotion of television stars.
Confronted with the suspension, by TVI, of the journalist Ana Leal, citizens demand the following responses from entities with legal obligations to supervise the free exercise of that right, as well as from the Administration of Grupo Prisa, which is obliged to respect the Constitution of the Republic and the democratic laws of a sovereign state like Portugal, which restored its independence in 1640:
Why did the deputy director, Judite Sousa, withdraw from the line-up of TVI’s Jornal das 8, on 26 January, a report on the decision of the deputy attorney general Cândida Almeida not to investigate, as she should, in the interest of all citizens and taxpayers, the strong indications of misuse of public funds in awarding the Integrated System of Emergency and Security Networks of Portugal (SIRESP) to a BPN group company?
Has the Public Ministry opened an inquiry to find out how it is possible that a PPP that cost at least 500 million euros upfront fails in an episode of bad weather, leaving INEM, firefighters and police without communications?
Why she considered, the most important deputy director in that newspaper, in its only channel accessible to all Portuguese, namely those with weaker resources, who do not have money to pay for cable TV, first report on the cleaning up of the forest in Sintra, a council presided over by Fernando Seara, husband of the joint director herself, and a dozen other fait-divers?
What does Parliament do to ensure that private companies, namely with the granting of television licenses, comply with Law 64/2007, which defines the Journalist Statute, and promises these professionals that they will not be disciplined for acting as they did the journalist Ana Leal?
What does the Professional Journalist License Commission do, to ensure that the media does not report or fails to report based on anyone’s particular interests? Is it true that TVI devotes, in its main newspaper, special attention to the activities of the Municipality of Sintra, with a greater number of reports than any other national media organ? Is it true that the deputy director failed TVI’s coverage of an independent candidacy in that municipality?
What are the Parliament, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Portfolio Commission doing to guarantee the freedom of the editorial boards, a constitutionally foreseen body, which supported the journalist Ana Leal?
What supervision do these entities exercise over the television license granted to Grupo Prisa and its adequacy to the CRP and the laws of Portugal?
A country where criminals and the powerful are systematically protected to the detriment of victims and its citizens is the definition of a dictatorship, which is why Portugal should leave the EU.
PORTUGAL ROBBED ME €130.000 EUR AND SIX YEARS OF MY LIFE!
Your comments are most welcome and appreciated, so please feel free to leave your comments at the bottom of this page.
