The parliamentary commission of inquiry into TAP will take office next Wednesday, the 22nd of February. The commission will have 17 deputies, nine of whom are from the PS. PSD will have four deputies on the committee and Chega, IL, BE and PCP will have one deputy each.
The date of the inauguration was decided this Wednesday by the President of the Assembly of the Republic, Augusto Santos Silva. “After listening to the conference of leaders, the president of Parliament will schedule the inauguration for the 22nd of February, after the plenary”, told PÚBLICO an official source from Santos Silva’s office.
At the leadership conference meeting this Wednesday, it was defined that the TAP inquiry will have the maximum number of deputies that the parliamentary inquiry regime allows. That is, 17 deputies.
The distribution by parliamentary groups is done in order to represent the results that came out of the January 2022 legislative elections. The parties have until Friday to indicate to the President of the Assembly of the Republic the deputies who will integrate the commission of inquiry.
According to information gathered by PÚBLICO, on the part of the liberals, deputy Bernardo Blanco will take the seat, with Carlos Guimarães Pinto taking the position of alternate. For BE, it will be the deputy Mariana Mortágua – who will be a candidate for leadership of the Bloc – to take a seat on the commission. For the PCP, deputy Bruno Dias will be appointed as effective and deputy Duarte Alves as an alternate. It remains to be seen which deputies represent the PS, PSD and Chega.
The sole deputies of PAN and Livre, Inês de Sousa Real and Rui Tavares, respectively, could be left out of the commission. This morning, after the leaders’ conference, the two deputies criticized the possibility of being excluded from the TAP inquiry commission. An understanding that, according to Lusa, gathers the consensus of the parliamentary groups.
“What the law says is that the composition has to be up to a maximum of 17 deputies – the law does not limit, and we do not make that interpretation, to parliamentary groups. And, therefore, not having this limitation and even having the possibility of a single deputy presenting a proposal for a committee of inquiry, the interpretation of the conference of leaders that only if Livre or PAN had been proponents of a parliamentary committee of inquiry is who could be part of it, it makes no sense to us”, maintained Inês Sousa Real, PAN spokesperson, quoted by Lusa.
The lawmaker expressed hope that the conference of leaders could still reconsider. In the same vein, Livre’s sole deputy stressed that “in the past there was already a commission of inquiry which included the Liberal Initiative, at the time with a single deputy [João Cotrim de Figueiredo]”.
“There was no allegation that this commission was illegal (…) and, therefore, the law serves as the basis for what the conference of leaders decides and for which it has political will or not”, defended Rui Tavares, quoted by the newspaper. Lusa, accusing the remaining forces with parliamentary groups of “hypocrisy” when they criticize the PS’s “steel roller”, but “don’t mind using it” against single deputies.
In 2020, when the commission of inquiry into Novo Banco was constituted, Parliament corrected its formation at the last minute, to integrate the then sole deputy of IL, João Cotrim de Figueiredo, who had been excluded from the initial formation. The argument used for this change, which took place the day before the inauguration, was that the liberals were one of the proponents of that inquiry. This time, the TAP survey has a single proponent – the Bloco de Esquerda.