“All expenses were budgetary”

Fernando Medina, former Finance Minister and current PS deputy, guaranteed this Thursday in statements in Parliament that “all expenses were budgetary”, thus refuting Joaquim Miranda Sarmento’s accusations about an increase in expenses of around a thousand million without budget allocation.

In a communication to journalists, Fernando Medina detailed some information regarding the handover of the portfolio to the current Minister of Finance: “The Government is now surprised by the data from the General Directorate of Budget. Basically, it uses a falsehood as it suggests that the country has a budgetary problem. And do not have”.

“There was a true, effective and tax reduction policy that the previous Government registered. There is lower tax collection and an increase in expenditure. There is a set of expenses that will only be incurred this year and will not be repeated”, highlighted Fernando Medina. “All the expenses I authorized were within the budget”, he guaranteed.

The former Minister of Finance revealed “deep concern” about Joaquim Miranda Sarmento’s statements and considered that the government official’s statements either reveal “the profound unpreparedness of the political team and the minister or the implementation of falsehood as an instrument of political combat”.

PSD requires urgent hearing from Fernando Medina

The PSD will request an urgent hearing from former Finance Minister Fernando Medina for having allegedly authorized, after the legislative elections, an increase in expenses of around one billion without budgetary allocation, the social-democratic parliamentary leader announced today.

Speaking to journalists in parliament, Hugo Soares said that the current Minister of Finance, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, revealed today that the previous executive, after the legislative elections on March 10, authorized a set of expenses “in the order of one billion euros , some of them without budget allocation”.

For the PSD parliamentary leader, “this is tremendous disloyalty, negligence, which puts into question what was expected to be the health of public finances”.

“I believe that a Government that, after the elections, authorizes expenditure in the order of one billion euros, much of it without being appropriate, can only be accused of an irresponsible and absolutely negligent Government, which wants to mortgage the future of those who legitimately should govern the destinies of Portugal”, he accused.