All of Portugal's opposition parties have criticised the final report into the expensive 'swaps' fiasco, accusing the author, the social democrat Clara Marques Mendes, or producing a whitewash to protect the current finance minister Maria Luís Albuquerque, (pictured)
Eight months, 42 hearings, thousands of documents analysed and three secretaries of state later the government approved the report of the investigation into the swaps scandal which concluded that yes, there was imprudent management of public money, but it blames only the José Sócrates government, the banks that sold the deals and the directors of the public companies that signed the contracts.
The current finance minister Maria Luís Albuquerque is hardly mentioned, not is her role in the gestation of these financial instruments which enabled a struggling government under Sócrates to push borrowings of public companies off balance sheet thus making the public accounts look markedly more respectable than in fact they were.
The author of the report Ana Catarina Mendes has been slated for huge partiality and attempting to exonerating anyone in the current regime that may have had anything to do with the scheme, most importantly the current Finance Minister whose claim that she may have heard the word ‘swaps’ around the coffee machine at work, but nothing more, puts her credibility in doubt.
The communist party’s Paulo Sá considers that the current government bears as much responsibility as the previous one in the 'swaps' scandal, but that this is not reflected in the report, “we can not agree with this whitewashing of the responsibilities of the current government.”
The communists claim that the duplicity of the approved report discredits the author and the government that has approved it.
Clara Marques Mendes is under heavy fire from the left but today repeatedly defended the accusations against her of a lack of impartiality, “the conclusions I drew are not my opinions, and the conclusions are non-partisan," she claimed, but nobody really believes her.
