There was a systematic attempt by the German company Ferrostaal to deceive the Portuguese State, today admitted Ambassador Pedro Catarino, the last president of the Comissão Permanente de Contrapartidas (CPC)
The committee oversaw the various contra deals agreed between the Portuguese state and commercial suppliers of military equipment and was disbanded in 2011 as the true extent of the waste, corruption and German companies' cynical treatement of its customers started to become clear.
Ferrostaal is part of the German consortium that sold two submarines to Portugal in 2004 for €820 million and signed a parallel agreement that required the Germans to inject €1.210 billion into the Portuguese economy over the subsequent eight years. This is has failed to do and an allied corruption trial saw German managers of the process given jail sentences, suspended.
At the end of 2013, and after a renegotiation of the agreement with the Germans in 2012 that pushed the deadline back to 2016, the amount spent in return for the submarine deal was precisely zero, according to a report from the Directorate General of Economic Activities.
In 2014 the Government accepted a €218 million investment in a German engineering company Koch Portugal, but this investment has remained just a pleasant thought in the minds of the German puppet masters. Then there was the high profile announcement of an investment in a hotel in Albufeira, quietly ditched later as, rather aptly, ‘the hotel owners wanted too much money.’
Pedro Catarino said that a parliamentary commission is investigating eight major defence equipment contracts made in the last 15 years, dominated by the submarines contract which was by far the largest one.
Had these contra deals been carried out correctly, the state would have seen inward investment of €2.429 billion from arms manufacturers, only 13% of this actually happened.
The Ferrostaal submarine case was even more suspicious than the other cases as the normal bank guarantee of 15% - 25% lodged in case of default was reduced to 10% and even then this is not triggered until 2017 and only after going to court.
"These are unusual circumstances, but it was what was written in the contract," explains the former chairman of the committee.
"The Germans acted in bad faith in the submarine deal, what I found, after taking office in 2007, were contra deals accepted by the Portuguese State which never should have been agreed," said Catarino.
The Minister of Defence through many of these huge deals where money has been squandered on an epic scale is the current deupty Prime Minister Paulo Portas who has remained calm through out desite the high probabliity that he was well aware of the arrangements and the 'commissions' that were paid by the Germans so as not to have to complete their side of the contra deal bargain.
