"There are no full safes, nor empty ones. Money from 2023 would not be transferable"
Manuela Ferreira Leite spoke about the exchange of accusations about the country's public accounts, and also about the statements of the PS general secretary, Pedro Nuno Santos, who alluded to the Durão Barroso government, in which the social democrat assumed the portfolio in question.
© Reuters
Política Manuela Ferreira Leite
"There are no full or empty coffers. Because the money from 2023 would never be transferred to 2024. They could be full, as empty, that 2024 would never benefit. This idea was an idea that probably intended to minimize any kind of facilities that the next Minister of Finance could have and that did not correspond to anything", she said, in her commentary space on CNN Portugal.
Another point highlighted by Ferreira Leite was also the reaction of the Secretary-General of the Socialist Party, Pedro Nuno Santos, who spoke about the Durão Barroso government, an executive in which the social democrat assumed the Finance portfolio. "There was information that I had doubts about, but exactly because I had doubts about the amount of the deficit, the Bank of Portugal was asked, as an independent entity, to check the accounts and say what the deficit was after all. It was not the Minister of Finance, nor the Durão Barroso government. We handed it over to the Bank of Portugal, at the time it was Governor Vítor Constâncio, who is a completely unsuspected person", she defended.
Ferreira Leite also considered that at the time, in 2022, there was a "default", since the deficit "was much higher than what was thought it was". "So much so that we had a process of excessive deficits launched by the European Commission", she pointed out, adding that the penalty consisted of the inaccessibility to community funds if the situation was not corrected that year.
"It is evident that it practically destroyed the program that existed. The idea that he promised one thing and that after all he did not... This story, which is a subject that has not been talked about, cannot be invoked to make any kind of comparisons", she warned, adding: "If there was such a comparison, it would be very serious".
Speaking in Parliament this Thursday, Pedro Nuno Santos took stock of the first month of governance of the Democratic Alliance, stating that after 30 days "a change of logo, a proposal to reduce IRS that turned out to be false, the promotion of instability in various administration services" and now "the dramatization of the situation of public accounts" by the Minister of Finance, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, who recalls "the speech of the thong of former Prime Minister Durão Barroso".
Read Also: 'War' of public accounts? "There seems to be a lack of solutions on both sides" (Portuguese version)
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