António Costa gave a lesson in political ethics on Tuesday. It took minutes for the Portuguese Prime Minister to get into the official car to run to present his resignation to the President of the Republic as soon as a press release from the Prosecutor’s Office was released announcing that he was going to be investigated by the Supreme Court. Costa indicated that he did not know what he was accused of but considered that the dignity of his position was in question if he did not present his resignation. The judicial operation has left Portuguese politics shaking after the arrest of two people from his closest circle, his Chief of Staff, Vítor Escária, and his friend Diogo Lacerda Machado for the alleged crimes of influence peddling, prevarication and corruption in four projects. energetic. There are three other people detained. And the Minister of Infrastructure, João Galamba, and the president of the Environment Agency, Nuno Lacasta, have also been charged.
What is striking about Costa is that he has not applied the same ethical demands to the people who have surrounded him. And this relaxation with respect to his people has ended up costing him his position. The alarms about the business of his close friend Diogo Lacerda Machado went off almost from the beginning. The relationship between the two, which began during their days as law students in Lisbon, has been so close that António Costa took him as best man at his wedding. He has wanted to have him just as close since he became head of the Government.
After being appointed prime minister in 2015, Costa turned to Lacerda Machado to negotiate the reversal of the privatization of the TAP airline, then in the hands of a consortium led by David Neeleman, owner of the Azul airline. In December of that year, the minister in charge of the airline presented his negotiating team to the owners of TAP: two secretaries of State and Diogo Lacerda. Two years later the prime minister will appoint him as administrator of the airline, when the majority of the capital is already back in public hands.
Costa is also in charge of managing the conflict with those affected by the collapse of Banco Espírito Santo and the dispute in the BIS between the Angolan Isabel dos Santos and CaixaBank. These intermediations were carried out without any type of appointment or contracting by the public administration (“too much relaxation”, would lament António Vitorino, the socialist who headed the International Organization for Migration) and ended up generating so much controversy that Costa decided to hire his friend for 2,000 euros. a month.
Diogo Lacerda Machado, who never joined the Socialist Party, had worked on António Costa’s team during his time as Minister of Justice during António Guterres’ term as Prime Minister. Starting in 2002, he dedicated himself to private business as an administrator of firms linked to banking, energy and airlines. When Costa became prime minister, his friend became a constant presence who seemed more at home in the backroom than in public office.
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In recent years the lawyer devoted himself to his private activity. His closeness to the prime minister and his entourage made him a coveted piece for investors in a hurry. In the case that led him to sleep two nights in a dungeon, Diogo Lacerda would have been the corrupter of António Costa’s Chief of Staff, Vítor Escária, according to the newspaper Public.
Lacerda was hired in 2021 by the British investment fund Pioneer Point Partners, which together with another American company was promoting the construction of a large digital data storage center in Sines, known as Start Campus. The project, which provided for an investment of 3.5 billion euros to build nine buildings powered by renewable energy, achieved classification as an initiative of Potential National Interest in 2022, a year after the signing of Costa’s friend. The lawyer was hired to “take advantage of his close friendship with the prime minister and his proximity to Vítor Escária,” according to sources from the Prosecutor’s Office cited by Expresso.
But the election of Escária as Chief of Staff also showed Costa’s relaxation with respect to his circle. Vítor Escária had had to resign in 2017 when he was economic advisor to the prime minister for the Galpgate, a scandal caused by the gift of trips and tickets paid by the Galp company to politicians to attend the 2016 Euro Cup in France. Escária and his wife had been two of the beneficiaries. This did not stop Costa from, in 2020, proposing him as Chief of Staff.
Another controversial signing of the prime minister was that of Miguel Alves as deputy secretary of state, where he barely remained 55 days, after being accused of prevarication during his time as mayor of Caminha. Alves had advanced 300,000 euros to a businessman with a dubious history to build an exhibition center that does not exist. This was one of the scandals that weighed down the first year of António Costa’s absolute majority. In nine months, 11 Secretaries of State left the Government, most due to alleged irregularities or conflicts of interest. The Prime Minister tried to downplay many of them as an accumulation of “casinos” and defended them sometimes beyond what was considered reasonable by the President of the Republic, as occurred during the scandal of João Galamba, the Minister of Infrastructure that Costa defended vehemently despite the delirious events experienced in his ministry, which included threats, robberies and the actions of the secret services.
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