Government already has letter from Azul confirming payment of TAP SGPS obligations
Minister Miguel Pinto Luz had said that the Government could not find the letter sent by the socialist Executive to Azul in 2020. Now, the Brazilian company provided the letter in question.
Azul delivered to the Ministry of Infrastructure the letter sent by the then minister, Pedro Nuno Santos, in June 2020, in which António Costa’s government confirmed the payment of TAP SGPS’s obligations to the Brazilian company, after the current executive stated that it had no document to prove it, according to the newspaper Público.
In the letter, the former socialist minister assured the Brazilian carrier’s management that “the Portuguese State only requests that Azul agree to remove the conversion right from the terms of the issue, nothing more”. The agreement, as stated in the communication, “will not constitute” a “degradation of the intrinsic value of the bonds”. In other words, Azul would always be entitled to repayment of the loan in question, worth €90 million, made in 2016, plus the respective interest (around €90 million accumulated to be paid at the end, in 2026).
The “legal certainty” that Azul claimed “only the courts can give it, as is proper in a state governed by the rule of law”, wrote the government at the time in the document. If justified, the company would receive the same treatment as “any other ordinary creditors” or as a “senior creditor”. At no point is the word “supply” used. At the time, Pedro Nuno Santos said: only a “favourable outcome will avoid the resort to nationalisation” of TAP.
