Portugal's new minister for planning and infrastructure, Pedro Marques, said he is in talks with Gateway as the state wants to buy back a controlling share of TAP.
The Gateway company control 61% of TAP but one of the Socialist Party’s pre-election commitments was to reverse recent privatisations, TAP’s amongst them.
"We've begun the negotiating process with the shareholders, but it’s still under discussion and I don't want to divulge details at this stage," said Marques.
The minister wants to do the deal as quickly as possible "so that TAP can have some stability and can continue to grow," un unlikely prospect if the government is back in charge.
The government “remained firm and determined to recover the majority of the share capital for the state," according to Marques, who then described TAP as, "a strategic company in the country's economic development and in its relationship with Portuguese-speaking countries."
TAP's chief executive Fernando Pinto said that reversing the airline’s privatisation would be rather tricky as the company already has spent half the €180 million that came in from Gateway when it took over.
Pinto memorably took a full ten years to prepare TAP for sale, earning the treasury just €20 million when he eventually managed to do so.
Many have questioned the sense of keeping him on as TAP's leader when he has been the reason for of many of the airline's past problems.
The TAP sale was rushed through by the caretaker government under Passos Coelho, using the reason that the airline was about to go bust, a statement that few believed then or now.
The communist MP Bruno Dias said today the privatisation needs to be undone as "all the reasons are there, political, economic and legal - to annul or immediately to reverse this privatisation, without any compensation, as it was an illegal act."
Dias called the rushed privatisation "a national scandal that must be ended once and for all,” condemning the sale of TAP under the Passos Coelho/Paulo Portas government as having “conducted a sale outside the law, illegal and unconstitutional carried out in the dead of night.”
