Portugal's current Prime Minister, Pedro Passos Coelho said yesterday that it is a "fruitless" quest to put pressure on the government over the BES missing deposits situation.
The Prime Minister said he is “not indifferent to the plight of people” but stressed that it is up to courts to resolve this issue.
The prime minister referred to the situation of the victims of the commercial paper fraud promulgated by the Espírito Santo Group management which instructed branches of Banco Espirito Santo to sell investments dressed up as deposits that would have been covered by the Bank of Portugal’s deposit guarantee scheme.
As if this comment was not enough to enrage the depositors further, the Prime Minister said that is any of them could not afford to go to court he would organise a whip-round.
The general secretary of the Socialist party today was justifiably critical of the PM’s comments, saying,
"What the Prime Minister said yesterday was not a gaffe, it was the expression of his deep underlying thoughts. He thinks that markets have nothing to do with governments and that governments can wash their hands like Pilate when deregulated markets cast aside those who trust in the functioning of institutions and harm those who trust their savings to companies and then find themselves betrayed."
António Costa said his party rejects the return to a country where access to fundamental rights "depend on the prime minister's charity" and went on to describe a situation where access to education, the health service, the public pension system and justice was based on government charity rather than a right of taxpayers to receive services which are paid for through taxation.
Costa said that for the Socialists, access to education, health, social security and justice "does not depend on public hand outs but are the fundamental rights of every citizen who expects the State to provide services and not to distribute charity."
The head of the PS warned that "after justice comes schooling, after schooling comes health, after health comes social security because the real dream of the right is that we can return to the past, where each person was born to their fate and their fate was determined at birth.”
Costa ended by saying that the current government will go down in history as the first that would leave power with a Gross Domestic Product smaller than the one it inherited.
The Passos Coelho moral compass seems to have lost direction as by continuing to hide behind the Bank of Portugal as regulator of all things financial, which in turn is trying to shift the blame to the stock market regulator, he sees the buck stopping way below his exalted position.
In fact the Prime Minister is in charge and should by now have overseen a resolution to this mess caused at source by the Bank of Portugal's lack of regulation of BES.
Passos Coelho continues to have faith in Carlos Costa at the Bank of Portugal as for the time being Costa is acting as an effective shield to ward off the angry BES depositors, many of whom, have lost their life savings.
Does Passos Coelho care? Only in as much as these depositors keep turning up to his carefully staged rallies to disrupt the smooth running of his election roadshow, disconcertingly named 'Marathon.'
The association representing the depositors said today that Passos Coelho knows full well the court system is in a mess and that he is displaying huge ‘intellectual dishonesty’ by suggesting that people in their 70s and 80s should go to court to recover their savings as it is common knowledge that no award will be made before 2025, or more likely 2030.
