The Inspectorate General of Finance (IGF) calculated the amount of compensation that Alexandra Reis will have to return to TAP at 450,110.26 euros. The figure appears in the IGF report made available by the Government following the press conference in which the Government revealed that the IGF concluded that the agreement for the departure of the company’s administrator was null and that the executive had decided to dismiss the CEO and the chairman from TAP. The manager does not agree with the opinion of the IGF but accepts to return the amount requested by the IGF.
“Engineer Alexandra Reis will have to return to TAP the amounts she received or benefited from following her termination as Director, which amount to a total of 450,110.26 euros”, reads in the report. The IGF considers that this return will have to be made “bearing in mind that, in any case, the compensation paid is null and void”.
This conclusion results from the fact that the IGF considers that: the public manager’s statute does not provide for the existence of waiver by agreement – the legal figure invoked in the contract for exit; even if it were a mere convenience cessation, it would have to be decided by another body; and, finally, because the agreement reached between Reis and TAP does not respect the time requirement foreseen in the public manager statute.
In other words, no matter where you look from a legal point of view, the agreement is considered void. The only parts of the compensation considered valid were the following: the parts relating to the termination of the individual employment contract and the respective compensation (56,500 euros). The agreement also provided for the payment of the remuneration for the month of February 2022 (17,500 euros) which is considered due.
However, this is not the reading of Alexandra Reis, who considers that “if the agreement is invalid, then we have a resignation for mere convenience – since the unilateral decision for my departure from the company was made by the CEO -, the which gives me, legally, the right to compensation”, said the manager in a statement sent to journalists.
Even so, it will return the amount that will be requested by TAP. “Although I disagree with the IGF opinion and nothing obliges me to do so, I reaffirm what I always said I would do: by my own will, I will return what the IGF indicates, regretting the character attacks I have been the target of in recent months and with eyes set in the future.”
The version that Alexandra Reis told to the IGF
To the IGF, according to the report made public by the Government, Alexandra Reis stated, on January 19, that the executive president of TAP, Christine Ourmières-Widener, called her on January 25, 2022 “saying that she was going to distribute her portfolios and that he wanted him to leave the company”.
Alexandra Reis, reads in the document produced by the IGF based on the meeting, “asked if the Government was in agreement with the matter and the CEO replied that it was, being her conviction that the urgency in resolving the matter would be related to the elections that would take place soon”.
The manager says she was “surprised” by her departure, because “she believed she was fulfilling her duties as an administrator”. She sometimes had “different points of view” from the CEO, but “never refrained from expressing her opinions” in a “professional way, raising questions and proposing alternatives”, as in the case, she says, of changing headquarters .
“Although the expression ‘dismissal’ was not used by the CEO, she understands that this was what happened and that there would be no conditions to continue in the company”, not least because her previous functions were occupied. Regarding the initial request for 1.4 million euros in compensation, she says that this was “an initial reference value and that it had an underlying rationale”.
Alexandra Reis says , reports the IGF, that “she was never alerted by her lawyers to any possible non-compliance with the agreement regarding the status of public manager” and that when she went to the public company NAV, a few months later, she was not “alerted to any question about the possible reduction of the amount of compensation received from TAP”, as provided by law.
On this aspect, the IGF report states that Alexandra Reis “maintained in her legal sphere all the amounts received as compensation for the termination of her duties as a director of the TAP Group, as well as the remuneration earned for the performance of the public functions referred to above, not having proceeded with the return provided for in paragraph 4 of article 26” of the public manager statute.