Whoever is writing speeches for Portugal’s President Cavaco Silva appears this week to have suffered a stroke of amnesia. The lapse has not been lost on Portugal’s more scurrilous press.
National tabloid Correio da Manhã runs with the headline: “TAP is an example of success”, and remarks that Cavaco Silva has been highlighting the fact that flights between Bogotá and Portugal are “almost always full”.
With news stories every day on the ingenious drug-smuggling going on between the two countries, it is highly likely that traffickers might also be using the airlines.
But to dub a company that is haemorrhaging money – TAP’s losses this year are in the region of €109.6 million – “an example of success” was just a tad off the mark.
Nonetheless, Cavaco continued on his way through the world’s corridors of power, posing with US President Barack Obama and even managing a 20-minute talk with United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, adds CM.
The 20 minutes were used to discuss “the situation in Guinea-Bissau, the oceans and Portugal’s participation in UN peace missions, among other subjects”, the paper added – giving the impression that both parties spoke at nineteen to the dozen.
The hectic circus continued, with Cavaco even having time to “exchange impressions” with Colombia’s head of state “over the integration of FARC revolutionaries into society”.
The president of Kosovo managed to grab a moment of our president’s time on this whirlwind tour to the States, adds CM, to ask for Portugal’s support over “adhesion to UNESCO”.
By NATASHA DONN [email protected]
