Lisbon, Sept. 3, 2024 (Lusa) - Portugal's General Inspectorate of Finance (IGF) believes that the remuneration of flag carrier TAP's managers, during the period in which it was partially privatised, was paid using a ‘simulated’ service contract, allowing them to evade tax responsibilities.
According to the document, to which Lusa has had access, and which reports on the conclusions of the IGF audit of TAP's accounts, the fixed and variable remunerations of the members of the company's Board of Directors were reviewed and adjusted by the Remuneration Committee (CV), but ‘no evidence was found of the payment to those directors of the remunerations established by the CV, not even accounting records or pay slips’.
However, it continued, on 18 January 2016, TAP, SGPS and Atlantic Gateway, the company that bought a majority stake in the carrier, signed ‘a contract for the provision of planning, strategy and support services for the restructuring of financial debt, including negotiation with banks’, with invoicing carried out on a monthly basis and based on an estimate submitted by 31 January of each year, ‘the purpose of which was to support the payment of remuneration to the aforementioned managers’.
According to the IGF, it was ‘confirmed that the aforementioned service contract supported the payment of remuneration to these directors, according to the information and calculations provided by the audited entity’.
The institution also concluded that ‘between the remuneration amounts deliberated by the CV (€3,524,922) and those actually charged by Atlantic Gateway (€4,264,260) there is an overall difference of around 21% more (€739,338), which was justified by TAP as the result of the application of the Single Social Tax (TSU - social security contributions) to the amounts deliberated by the CV', although 'no evidence was presented to attest to this justification'.
Even so, it emphasised, ‘even taking the TSU into account, the amount ( €4,238,126) is still €26,134 lower than the amount invoiced’.
The IGF also detailed the remuneration of three directors, with David Pedrosa receiving more than €2.6 million between 2015 and 2020, including fixed remuneration, bonuses and other items. Humberto Pedrosa received €436,800, the same amount as David Neeleman.
‘Thus, the available data leads us to conclude that the payment of remuneration to the directors in question was made through a simulated service contract (since apparently the purpose was not the same as that for which it was signed), presenting itself only as instrumental to the intended effect,’ the IGF pointed out.
The organisation said that this ‘procedure appears to be irregular in the payment/receipt of remuneration to the members of the Board of Directors, who thus avoided their responsibilities in terms of personal income tax and social security contributions’.
The IGF also said that ‘the audited organisation did not provide any grounds to justify the adoption of this inadequate procedure’.
The government has already sent the report of the General Inspection of Finance (IGF) on TAP to the Public Prosecutor's Office (MP) after receiving it last week, the Minister for Housing and Infrastructures, Miguel Pinto Luz, said today.
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