António Costa: amendments to the budget weigh €5.7bn

They either increase the expenditure or reduce the revenue. The Prime Minister has made his final analysis on the almost 1,000 proposals for amendment to the State Budget for 2019, and if all of them were to be approved the government would end up with an unbalance of about €5.7bn — €3.8bn coming from the reductions in revenue, and €1.8bn from the measures which would increase expenditure.

“If we sum up the effect all the different proposals coming from all the parties in the political spectrum, both those aiming at reducing revenue or increasing expenditure, there is a budgetary catastrophe”, given that there would be a “€5.7bn deviation” in comparison to the initial state budget proposal approved by the Parliament at the end of October. The Prime Minister was talking at a conference held to commemorate the three years of government.

The Prime Minister specified that these amendment proposals would imply a reduction in revenue of about €3.8bn and an increase in expenditure of about €1.8bn. “It is absurd to imagine these proposals being approved by every party; they will completely undermine the initial state budget we proposed”, which aims at a deficit of 0.2% of GDP. António Costa added that, in this scenario, “the Parliament would be failing to comply with their approval of the State Budget on the 31st of October”.

“It would be a financial catastrophe” if this were to happen, the Prime minister said, giving emphasis to the series of alerts handed out in the last couple of days regarding the State Budget’s “spending spree”.