Catarina Martins, the leader of Portugal’s Left Bloc political party has called for the resignation of the entire Parvalorem board and a full external audit of the incestuous company that is meant to be looking after the taxpayers’ interests in State-owned businesses.
Martins demanded a full investigation into the activities of the board at the end of a meeting with Parvalorem’s workers council.
"You have to know what has been going on so that all harmful business practices can be corrected as soon as possible," said Martins who rightly points out that the board is stuffed full of hangers on and friends of the former Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho.
Martins said that former associates of the former prime minister have come from Tecnoforma - Francisco Nogueira Leite and Francisco Banha, and every day "the Portuguese taxpayers are losing more money."
Parvalorem is the largest creditor of Galilei (formerly the Sociedade Lusa de Negócios), which controlled Banco Português de Negócios (BPN) bank before it was bailed out by Portugal’s unwitting taxpayers in 2008. Bad management and malpractice-related debt of €1,800 billion and management irregularities were to blame, i.e. theft on a grand scale which has never been punished.
The Left Bloc leader also wants clarification on Pivot, a company that recently acquired Efisa and that has the former PSD minister Miguel Relvas listed as a shareholder, with the entirely credible implication that anything Relvas is involved in generally can be assumed to be crooked.
The current board of Parvalorem, and the people it hires to carry out its business, is the same old Passos Coelho chums’ gravy train and Martins says the conflicts of interests are so blindingly obvious that she insists that Parvalorem is investigated forthwith.
Martins wants the board replaced with people who actually act in the taxpayers’ best interests, not their own, and that the workers who are trying to sell assets to recover money for the taxpayer should be treated better and more aware of management strategy as until now they have been instructed rather than managed.
The Left Bloc’s view is that there is "a huge opacity" and a "conflict of interest" enveloping the Parvalorem board which was set up to manage the assets resulting from the privatisation of BPN
Parvalorem’s mishandling of the sale of an €80 million Miró art collection, that for some reason was owned by BPN, put the spotlight on its inability to manage, communicate or raise necessary funds with a cash offer for the entire collection mysteriously rejected by Nogueira Leite in favour of an auction process that he failed to complete.
If ever a public body needed investigating, Parvalorem is the one as it is run by incompetents much for their own benefit.
