Investments of €5.8 billion in defence will be decided “in secret”

The Portuguese government’s €5.8 billion investment in the defence sector will be made without resorting to public tenders or transparent selection processes, according to Friday’s edition of the weekly newspaper Expresso. The Ministry of Defence has already sent proposals to the European Commission to access the loan, financed by the European Security Action Facility (SAFE) — an amount representing 2% of Portugal’s gross domestic product (GDP) — and the deal will be done on a state-to-state basis. The decision was taken by Minister Nuno Melo based on the opinion of a working group. So far, the procedures have been secret.

According to Vasco Xavier Mesquita, a lawyer at Morais Leitão, the expectation is that “there will be no public tenders”. The lawyer describes the process as “secret and classified”, suggesting that “there should be a rule or indication from the European Commission on how it will validate this financing”. Two other lawyers, Francisca Mendes da Costa and Daniel Castro Neves, from Sérvulo & Associados, also anticipate that “there will be no need for public tenders”, although this does not mean that European Union (EU) Member States are “exempt from the requirements of competition, impartiality and transparency that flow from the Constitution and the Treaty of Lisbon”.

For Marcos Perestrello, member of parliament for the Socialist Party (PS), the scale of these contracts “is incompatible with decision-making in secret”. For this reason, the Socialist parliamentary group will propose the creation of a subcommittee within the Parliamentary Defence Committee to monitor investments in the sector, focusing on the development of investments to be made, in order to involve academia, research centres and industry, in addition to the needs of the Portuguese Armed Forces. In addition, it will present a bill to “strengthen the powers of the Assembly of the Republic in matters of National Defence”.