With focus never far from Portugal’s financial situation, news today has returned to the Plan B that Brussels is ‘demanding’ - and which Portugal’s Socialist leaders are saying ‘doesn’t exist’.
Cutting through the verbiage, the fact that President of the Republic Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has called yet another Council of State - this time for July - is extremely relevant.
Thousands of people are pushing for “Justice for Rodrigo Lapa”, the Algarve teen whose battered body was found on scrubland near his Portimão home in February - presumably killed by his absconded Brazilian stepfather.
They refuse to accept that “an individual who has committed a crime in Portugal is able to hide under the flag of another nationality, in the shelter of agreements between countries”.
Two underage lovebirds have runaway from home, telling their parents: “We love you. See you when we’re grown up”
Fourteen-year-old Juliana Ribeiro and her 16-year-old sweetheart Marco Santos went missing last Friday.
Their notes to their parents said: “We have work, we’re not going to be hungry, don’t call the police”, and Marco is understood to have written: “Don’t sell my scooter, or my things. Sorry for what we’ve done, but we love you. "
The Algarve’s infamous EN125 road – known for its alarming number of car accidents – has also been flagged as “unsafe for cyclists or pedestrians”.
The 28-year-old British mum reported missing last week from Boliqueime with her children by their apparently distraught father has ‘set the record straight’, cataloguing what she claims have been ‘years of abuse’.
Christine Davies told the Resident this week that she snapped after partner Aaron Rodwell allegedly threatened to smother the couple’s baby with a pillow.
“That moment I knew ‘when he goes out tomorrow, we’re gone’,” she told us. “I put up with his abuse, God knows why, but I will not allow anyone to hurt my children.
A 26 year-old Portuguese man, who has not been named, was arrested last week after a 5-star hotel in the tourist centre of the Catalan capital reported that he left without paying a bill of around €1,000. It emerged that he had, in fact, stayed at a total of 14 hotels in Barcelona, running up bills totalling €7,525.44.
In another black week for Novo Banco - the so-called “good bank” that Portugal desperately needs to sell - media reports have exposed a catastrophic ‘mistake’ that saw thousands of euros transferred erroneously to former clients; news that the bank “stands to lose 838 million euros in Angola” and a censure by the IMF on the way the bank’s accounts were made to look ‘better’ by retroactively dumping €2 billion-worth of senior bonds.
With no news on any ‘firmly-committed prospective buyers’ in sight, the first three days of the week could hardly have looked worse.
Then came more bad news.
Fifteen service chiefs with CP - Comboios de Portugal have been exposed for receiving between 1000 and 2000 euros in pay rises, just when the 2016 State Budget stated “there is no room for management bonuses, and pay rises in public businesses are prohibited”.
To make matters worse, the railway authority registered losses of 159,000 euros in its most recently published set of accounts (referring to 2014).
