Horta, Azores, Portugal, Dec. 10, 2024 (Lusa) - The leader of the Azores Socialist Party (PS/Azores) has warned of the risk to the survival of the airline SATA and regretted that the president of the regional government (PSD/CDS-PP/PPM) is more concerned with blaming the party than "resolving the situation".
"You only have to look at the [financial] results to realise that the company's survival is at risk," said Francisco César on Monday, adding that, for this reason, the PS has made itself available for a regime agreement in relation to SATA.
The PS/Azores leader, who was speaking in the city of Horta at a meeting with activists from the island of Faial, emphasised that the party is available to discuss the future of the Azorean airline.
"We are willing to accept and share the responsibility for what is done, but we also have to take some of the responsibility for the decision and what they did was ignore us and say that there was a place on an Advisory Board for us to nominate someone if we wanted to," he said, quoted in a party press release.
He continued: "This [Regional] Government has been in office for four years, [the ministers] have already injected €453 million, they're on their third term of office and [SATA] has already made an average loss of €43.6 million a year since they came in, but they continue to blame PS governance."
Francisco César says that the PS/Azores is more concerned "with solving the company's problem than discussing the blame".
In his speech, the regional leader of the Socialists also lamented the fact that SATA is being privatised without the debt, questioning why "more than 50% of the company" is being sold.
"In this matter, it's important to know. It wasn't the European Commission that demanded that more than 51% of SATA International be privatised, it was the Regional Government that asked the European Commission to privatise more than 51% of SATA International," he said.
Francisco César recalled that in the case of TAP there was no such demand, but in the Azores "there is a rage to privatise everything there is", namely "EDA [Electricity of the Azores] companies or other companies that provide public services, all in the name of not harming the taxpayer".
"This is a company [SATA] that is fundamental to the Azores and I'm sorry that the [Azores regional] government is more concerned with blaming the PS than resolving the situation," he said.
The Socialist leader believes that there should be times "when we avoid partisan bickering and work towards consensus in favour of our land".
"That's the path I want to follow with the PS," he concluded.
SATA is among the companies with the worst results in 2023 in the autonomous regions of the Azores and Madeira, and is also the one that has had the greatest impact on the performance of the regional public business sector.
The conclusions were published in a report released on Wednesday by the Public Finance Council (CFP), an independent body created in Portugal in 2012 that monitors the country's compliance with budgetary rules and the sustainability of its public finances.
"The regional public business sector (SPER) is ‘greatly affected by the companies of the SATA group’, a situation that ‘reinforces the need to continue restructuring SATA in order to guarantee its sustainability, continuity of operation and minimisation of the Region's financial effort", according to the report.
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