Maria Luís Albuquerque asked Parvalorem, the public company that manages the toxic assets of the bust Banco Português de Negócios (BNP), to conceal a loss of €150 million so as not to increase the 2012 deficit.
Parvalorem was told to hide part of the massive losses on non-performing loans at the request of Maria Luís Albuquerque, when she was Secretary of State at the Treasury.
According to an interview on Antena 1 yesterday, the current finance minister knew the Parvalorem would suffer losses of €577 million from BPN loans at risk of default.
Parvalorem was instructed to use an accounting fiddle to delay the impact until some distant point in the future and forced minions to change the already audited 2012 accounts.
According to the interviewee who was part of the working group that arranged the accounting alterations, the management of Parvalorem took three days to respond to and fulfill the request made by Albuquerque,
"This surgery reduced the impairment value from €577 million to €420 million," i.e. about €150 million was gone from the old BPN accounts in order not to increase the 2012 deficit.
The Ministry of Finance today reacted to the news that Albuquerque hid BPN related losses, stating that "losses are always recorded in Parvalorem accounts at the time they occur."
According to a statement from the ministry sent to newsrooms today, there was "no manipulation or concealment of accounts."
The accounts were assessed and evaluated "by the auditors and impairments adequately reflected in the accounts.”
With only 4 days to go before the general election, anything that can be revealed by the socialist opposition will be lapped up by many news services, starved as they are of real policies and election sparkle.
The socialist opposition pondered aloud on how many more government tricks are still to be revealed after the 2012 accounts were fiddled to limit BPN’s losses to ease the national deficit.
Leader António Costa said "What we must ask ourselves is how many tricks are still to be discovered ... not a week goes by in which the government isn't caught out in attempts to fool the opublic."
Subsequent to the Antena 1 radio interview, the socialists demanded that Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho urgently clarified what exactly had gone on.
Costa added that there are "no numbers, tricks or accounting that can disguise the reality of people's lives" including mass emigration of the young in search of work.
