Lisboa, Nov. 18, 2025 (Lusa) - The president of Portugal said on Tuesday that he expected the investigation that led to the searches at TAP to be thorough but swift, expressing concern about the Portuguese state's position in the process of partial reprivatisation of the airline.
"It is advantageous for the privatisation of TAP in general that everything that needs to be investigated is investigated thoroughly but also quickly," Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said in response to journalists at the Carcavelos Campus of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in the municipality of Cascais.
The head of state said that "an operation such as the privatisation of TAP implies bids, implies interest from several candidates", and said that, in this context, "the less doubt there is about what happened, especially a long time ago, the better it is for Portugal's position".
"When it comes to TAP, what matters is Portugal's position," the president added.
The national director of the Judicial Police confirmed today that searches had been carried out at TAP and other locations as part of an investigation led by the Central Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DCIAP) into the privatisation of 61% of the airline's capital to the Atlantic Gateway consortium in 2015.
When asked about these searches, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa replied that he had seen "that there is an investigation into the 2015 decision", and that this "is a topic that had already been discussed", but "then stopped being discussed for a long time".
The 2015 privatisation was conducted by the then PSD/CDS-PP government led by Pedro Passos Coelho. The winning consortium was led by US businessman David Neeleman and included Portuguese businessman Humberto Pedrosa, from the Barraqueiro Group, where searches were also carried out today.
According to a statement from the Attorney General's Office (PGR), the searches covered 25 locations, including companies, law firms and chartered accountants, and no arrests were made.
According to the PGR, there are suspected offences of harmful administration, economic participation in business, passive corruption in the private sector, qualified tax fraud and qualified social security fraud.
IEL/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
