Lacerda Machado: "TAP must be privatized and quickly"

Diogo Lacerda Machado, former director of TAP, defended this Tuesday in Parliament that the airline "must be privatized and quickly ", highlighting that in February 2020, before Covid-19, the carrier "was worth millions" and "led me to believe that the sale for 10 million [made in 2015 to Atlântic Gateway] was a brutal loss for Portuguese taxpayers".

"TAP's management must be a private management oriented towards the market ", he told the deputies, within the scope of the hearing requested by the Liberal Initiative on the conclusions of the General Inspectorate of Finance's audit of TAP's accounts.

Regarding TAP's purchase of the Maintenance and Engineering company Brazil, the IGF stated in its audit that the "economic rationality of the decision by TAP's management to participate in the business" and, subsequently, "not to share the risks and burdens of that participation with Geocapital", a company for which Lacerda Machado was then a lawyer, had not been demonstrated. Machado, however, once again defended the acquisition of Varig's maintenance company in Brazil in 2005, considering it TAP's best investment in 50 years , "as a means for the subsequent acquisition of Varig to position TAP as Brazil's main air carrier to Europe".

"It was this investment that made TAP a multinational, which allowed TAP to have an absolutely abnormal market share in flights between Brazil and Europe and which justifies the interest of aviation groups that want to take shares in TAP ", stated Lacerda Machado.

"I hope, I value and I wish that TAP is privatized, and that it is privatized quickly, and that above all what makes it a fundamental agent in the Portuguese economy is to continue its operation, which unfortunately may not be greater because of an absolutely inexplicable deal which is the privatization of the monopoly of a country's airport infrastructures for 50 years in exchange for nothing ", said the lawyer referring to the sale of ANA to the Vinci group.

In his opinion, " this is the worst deal ever made in commercial civil aviation in Portugal, and it is identified by those interested in TAP as TAP's biggest problem ."

In 2005, Lacerda Machado was a lawyer for Geocapital, the Macanese company that entered into the business of purchasing the maintenance company in Brazil with the Portuguese airline, later becoming an administrator.

In his opinion, it was from this deal – which for years penalized TAP SGPS's accounts – that "the difference was radical" in the company's operations. "It was the best strategic investment decided by TAP's management, which today explains what its most important value as an airline is."

Lacerda Machado said he had no involvement in the business decision and that when he was an administrator he "received zero", ensuring that "Geocapital did not make any money from the operation".

Regarding other conclusions of the IGF audit, the lawyer only said that he had no involvement in the payment of 55 million to David Neeleman in 2020, nor in the remuneration and bonuses paid to directors through a service provision contract, stressing that remuneration issues in the company "were the responsibility of the remuneration committee".