Dodgy EDP support scheme – Committee calls Barroso, Sócrates and Passos Coelho

The parliamentary committee, established to look into the hundreds of millions of taxpayer euros that have been handed over to EDP as part of the dodgy CMEC deal, has published the list of people from whom it wants to hear evidence.

The Left Bloc has submitted a request that the committee calls all the prime ministers since and including Durão Barroso but excluding the current PM, António Costa.

Going by the snappy title of ‘The Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry on the Payment of Excessive Income to Producers of Electricity,’ the committee will look into the so-called Contractual Equilibrium Maintenance Costs (CMEC), to establish whether the government of the day signed cosy agreements that benefitted EDP at the expense of taxpayers.

The disgraced and incompetent banker, Ricardo Salgado is on the list, as is former PM José Sócrates amid a tally of 43 well known names who, the committee aims to establish, colluded to rip-off the taxpayer by an estimated €500 million, and counting.

The Left Bloc also has presented a list of 19 documents that it wants the committee to demand. These include all correspondence and documents sent or received by members of the Portuguese government to representatives of the European Commission, to the Directorate-General for Competition of the EC and to the Troika, during the period in question, as well as copies of any opinions produced by the regulatory authorities on the matter.

The bundle of requests was delivered by Left bloc MPs Jorge Costa and Moisés Ferreira to the chairman of the committee of inquiry, Mercês Borges.

The commission is to meet on June 5 to approve the first list of documents to demand. On June 14 the committee will approve the first list of people it wants to question in person, after which the fun will commence.

The list includes the former heads of the responsible regulatory bodies: Jorge Vasconcelos and Vítor Santos, former presidents of the Regulatory Entity for Energy Services (ERSE), and Cristina Portugal, the current president of ERSE, as well as Abel Mateus, Manuel Sebastião and António Ferreira Gomes, former presidents of the Competition Authority.

Then there’s the politicians: Carlos Tavares (Economy Minister between 2002 and 2004), Durão Barroso (Prime Minister from 2002 to 2004), Santana Lopes (who led the Social Democrat government from 2004 to 2005), Socialists Manuel Pinho – already accused of receving €2.5 million in backhanders from EDP –