Miguel Relvas, while Secretary of State for Local Government in the Barroso administration, created the Foral programme to promote the training of employees of Portugal’s councils and was created with European funds. All laudable and above board, so far...
The advertising campaign for the project was awarded in 2002 to a small, little known media company, NTM, which was owned by a former PSD MP and current Secretary of State for Social Security, Augustine Branquinho.
The contest for the advertising work was awarded to Branquinho by Miguel Relvas who discounted other well known agencies using a series of questionable criteria which had not been used before, or indeed since.
The normal practice was the Coordinating Committees for Regional Development used their own agencies to promote any such scheme regionally, but in this case Miguel Relvas, through his chief of staff Paul Nunes Coelho and his deputy Susana Viseu, opted to launch a competition to choose one company to handle the advertising nationally. The clear inference by the prosecutors is that Relvas ensured his chum got the lucrative contract.
Nine media companies pitched and six were immediately excluded without their proposals ever being evaluated. Four were dismissed for lacking the financial capacity and technical know-how, and another for lack of know-how.
Among the five excluded for lack of financial standing was McCann Erickson Portugal, which at the time was the third in the top 30 advertising companies in the country. NTM was not in the top 30 ranking and also managed to come up with the highest price at €375,000 plus VAT.
Shortly after the award of the campaign to NTM, Augustine Branquinho sold the company to an anonymous buyer. The sale was made using the services of José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, the current Minister of Defence.
Branquinho then resigned as chairman of the board which he should not have done until the end of the 9 month contract.
Unsurprisingly NTM went bust owing over €1 million and the deal now is being investigated by state prosecutors, ten years after the events.
Miguel Relvas left politics this year when forced to resign over the university degree scandal and is notable for experiencing a degree of difficulty in expressing any facts in a credible manner.
The Relvas career has been characterised by a habit of taking personal advantage of his political status without apparently breaking the law. His resignation brought joy to thousands and rid the government of possibly its finest recent example of all that is bad in Portuguese politics.
Maybe this time he will be proved to have exceeded his authority, or acted in a manner unbecoming, or even receiving backghanders. If the prosecutors can follow any residual trail of money this would suit his detractors very well.
_________The Wikipedia entry for Relvas makes interesting reading and begs the question as to how he ever became a government minister
