Portuguese officials showed “discomfort” at an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report on Portugal released in February, pressing for the removal of the word ‘corruption’, according to the rapporteur for the document.
Álvaro Santos Pereira, a former economy minister of Portugal who is now in a senior position at the OECD, made the revelations in Lisbon on Thursday at a hearing of parliament’s committee on constitutional affairs, rights, freedoms and guarantees.
“There was at least some discomfort,” he told deputies. “Both the Portuguese delegation at the OECD and later a member of the government showed some concerns about the report, namely they expressed their intention to remove the word ‘corruption’ from the report, because they said that the problem of corruption in Portugal is not among the most serious.”
The former minister, who was speaking as rapporteur for the OECD’s Economic Survey of Portugal at the request of the opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD), was referring to the part in the report concerning reform of the justice system and corruption.
Santos Pereira served in a PSD-led coalition government from June 2011 and July 2013 before a reshuffle saw him leave the executive. In April 2014 he took up his current post as director of the country studies branch of the OECD’s economics department.
He told deputies that the team that represented Portugal on the committee reviewing the report at the OECD was led by the secretary of state for finance, Ricardo Mourinho Félix.
“Nothing in this report is extremely controversial,” he went on. “What we could not accept is [that] just because a government says it does not like the word corruption, that word does not appear.”
The OECD director added that there had been another country, “also Latin,” that had attempted to ensure that “corruption charts didn’t appear” in the report on that country. He stressed that “in all countries, from Denmark to Sweden, to Portugal, Italy and others, the issue of corruption is central.”
