LISBON (Reuters) – Portugal’s Infrastructure Minister Joao Galamba stepped down on Tuesday as a scandal around state-owned airline TAP widened, just four months after his predecessor resigned over the same issue.
The Socialist Party, led by Prime Minister Antonio Costa, won an outright parliamentary majority in January 2022, but his government has been plagued by instability with more than 10 ministers and secretaries of state leaving their posts since.
“I present my resignation for the sake of the necessary institutional tranquillity, values by which I have always guided my behaviour,” Galamba said in statement, denying any wrongdoing, and adding it was crucial for him to reaffirm that his ministry “never sought to hide any fact or document” about TAP.
Galamba’s predecessor, Pedro Nuno Santos, resigned in December in the wake of a scandal involving an irregular severance payment of 500,000 euros ($550,100) to a former executive board member of TAP.
The scandal has snowballed since with the opposition accusing the government of lying.
The growing controversy around TAP could hinder Lisbon’s plans to privatise the airline, with bigger foreign rivals Lufthansa, Air France-KLM and British Airways owner IAG laying the groundwork for potential bids.
($1 = 0.9089 euros)
(Reporting by Sergio Goncalves and Catarina Demony; Editing by Andrei Khalip)
