“Fundamental” was the word chosen to explain the €20,000-plus bill run up last week by Agriculture Minister Assunção Cristas when she stayed at a luxury hotel complex in California with two colleagues.
The long-distance trip was to attend a conference on oceans at the World Ocean Summit 2014, at which President of the Republic Cavaco Silva gave a closing keynote interview.
Cristas used the opportunity to try and drum up foreign investment, said a source from the Agriculture Ministry, holding a series of meetings “at the highest level”.
The swanky Ritz-Carlton, overlooking the sea at Half Moon Bay, was thus the ideal location. Its lowest cost accommodation starts at €452 per night, with top-tier suites costing €981.
The ministry would not confirm how much the agriculture minister spent on her room – or indeed her executive class flight – but it did stress that this kind of presence was “fundamental to show and assume the importance of a country and its relationship with the sea”.
Dividing the five-day trip by three, each member of the ministry spent €6,809. It isn’t a huge amount, if one considers the roadshows and promo visits that take place all the time, but the fuss it generated on social media shows that people are at their wits’ ends with stories of how the government spends taxpayers’ money. “Fourteen times the minimum wage in five days!” wrote one Facebook commentator.
Meantime, one of the first “stories” Cristas returned to from her “fundamental” trip was the aside in Correio da Manhã that she said, back in 2012, that an inventory of all the public buildings carrying asbestos in their make-up was “not a number one priority”. The country has since been plunged into “asbestos alert” with scare stories filling the headlines. That inventory now appears to be very much a number one priority (see story on page 6).
