The Council of Ministers has agreed with Parpública that negotiations to sell TAP should continue with only two of the three bidders for TAP.
The rejection of Pais do Amaral’s bid does not mean the end of any Portuguese involvement as latecomer to the race, Humberto Pedrosa from the Barqueiro Group, is in partnership with the American businessman David Neeleman and their bid has been accepted.
The state company handling the taxpayers’ interests, Parpública, rejected the bid from the Miguel Pais do Amaral consortium for "for not meeting the legal requirements," leaving David Neeleman and Germán Efromovich fronting consortia in the race to buy 61% of the ailing airline.
The Secretary of State for Transport, Sérgio Monteiro, said today at the usual press conference after the Council of Ministers' meeting that Parpública had decided to exclude the proposal from Quifel, the Pais do Amaral company used to mount his bid, as the bid it had submitted had not been a binding one.
Amaral has asked for at least another month before submitting a binding offer as he was concerned as to the financial impact of the recent ten day strike at the airline.
The Council of Ministers therefore has instructed Monteiro, plus Isabel Castelo Branco from the Treasury, to proceed with negotiations with the other two consortia, with the involvement of Parpública.
The TAP board led by Fernando Pinto formally gave its opinion of the three plans for TAP submitted by the bidders, delivering same to Parpública on Wednesday.
No news yet on the TAP downsizing plan that Pinto is meant to be submitting to the Minister of the Economy, although nobody really believed such a plan would ever see the light of day as TAP is sold off and Pinto joins the dole queue.
Efromovich owns the Latin American airline Avianca through his Synergy Group, and plans to boost the number of new aircraft if his TAP bid is successful, injecting €250 million as well as starting to renewing the ageing fleet. He wants to use new, part-Portuguese made Embraer aircraft which will go down well with the government.
David Neeleman owns Air Blue in Brazil and is in partnership with Humberto Pedrosa of the Barraqueiro Group which runs a sizeable domestic transport business in Portugal including Frota Azul and EVA Transportes in the Algarve.
This partnership proposes to strengthen TAP with 53 new planes and invest €350 million.
Pais do Amaral promised to follow the Fernando Pinto management strategy of buying 12 more Airbus aircraft, which may have been a mistake as anything that apes the current chief executive’s planning may be seen as weak when fresh ideas and plans are needed to win the bidding and breathe some fresh life into TAP.
So we are down to two foreign bidders which seem well matched. As the next stage is negotiation, the government team is in an ideal position to get more for the taxpayer from the deal as the current €25-30 million on offer for the TAP shares is embarassingly low.
