It took seven hours of tough questioning and, even so, the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the BES banking scandal remained unconvinced by the Governor of the Bank of Portugal Carlos Costa’s answers.
As Jornal i remarked, “I wanted to but I couldn’t” was the repeated response of Carlos Costa as MPs grilled him on why it took so long to stop the rot at BES. Jornal i confirmed MPs “were not satisfied” when they finished with Costa.
The grilling, which went over two hours over schedule, kept coming up against the same dead-end response: “I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”
The law, said Costa, simply failed to give him the means to step in any sooner.
“If we had known in November 2013 what we came to learn in May 2014; if we had had the confessions that resulted from the interviews of May 2014, the outcome would have been very different,” Costa told his far-from impressed audience.
As the inquiry staggered through the first day, with former vice-governor Pedro Duarte Neves being questioned at the end, the week ahead promised to be heavy-going.
Tuesday (November 18) saw MPs question the president of Portugal’s insurance institute José Almaça and stock market supervisor Carlos Tavares, and on Wednesday it was the turn of former Socialist finance minister Teixeira dos Santos, and current Finance Minister Maria Luís Albuquerque.
In all, 130 people are due to be called, including politicians, bank regulators and members of the Espírito Santo family. If all takes as long as Costa did to be heard, the inquiry will run way over its allotted four-month time slot.
