The book “Millions flying: the lies they told us about TAP”, by Carlos Guimarães Pinto and André Pinção Lucas, will be presented at the Municipal Library of Faro, next Tuesday, February 8, at 17:30 pm.
The presentation will be in charge of Raquel Ponte, former journalist, manager and promoter of citizenship initiatives, and José Carlos Vilhena Mesquita, historian, author and professor at the University of Algarve.
In “Millions in flight: the lies we were told about TAP”, the authors “deconstruct, one by one, all the arguments that have been used by other political leaders to justify the injection of public capital into TAP”, he says. the Instituto +Liberdade, which promotes the session.
«This reinforcement means a charge of at least around 400 euros per Portuguese or 800 euros for each Portuguese worker. The justification that has been presented, for one of the biggest injections ever by the State in a public company, focuses, essentially, on the essential character of the airline for the economy, for employment, for tourism and even for national sovereignty» .
In this book, the authors ask: “But is it really so? Would it really be a disaster for the country not to inject taxpayers' money into TAP? Or is the disaster going ahead with the recapitalization? What happened in other countries that dropped their flag airline when it was in similar circumstances to TAP?»
In this work, the authors «do the math in detail» to demonstrate «if the arguments used by the rulers correspond with reality». “Not surprisingly”, the authors find that “the whole narrative is belied by the numbers and the facts”.
«There are few issues in Portuguese political life that have been treated with such opacity as the injection of money into TAP, which is worrying, because no country grows by injecting money into a bankrupt company», defends Carlos Guimarães Pinto, director of +Liberdade and co-author of the book.
Carlos Guimarães Pinto holds a PhD in Economics from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto and was a strategy consultant in the area of Telecommunications and Digital Economy. He has worked as a consultant in more than 20 countries on four continents and has taught economics at several universities in Portugal and abroad.
He is a resident commentator at Porto Canal and columnist for the newspapers Eco, Jornal de Notícias and Defesa de Espinho. He was president of the Liberal Initiative party between 2018 and 2019.
André Pinção Lucas is co-founder and director of Information and Analysis at Instituto +Liberdade, with a degree in Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Business Information Systems.
He was a strategic consultant at McKinsey & Company and led commercial development and business analysis at Sonae MC. He worked at The Navigator Company, where he was involved in transformational projects and once co-led a technology startup. He has published several opinion pieces, especially on economics and politics.
This presentation comes at a time when it is evident, also in Faro, the exhibition “Memory: Totalitarianism in Europe”, dedicated to the totalitarian regimes in Europe, which can be visited at Largo de Manuel Teixeira Gomes until the 12th of February.
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