Lisbon, Oct. 10, 2024 (Lusa) - Portugal's prime minister said on Thursday that he hopes the Court of Auditors "will not delay the prior approval" of the high-speed rail contract and assured that the government is working "to streamline procedures" and combat excessive bureaucracy.
Luís Montenegro was speaking at the presentation of the award to the Lusolav consortium of the concession for the first of three phases (Porto-Oiâ) of the high-speed railway line between Lisbon and Porto, where the minister for housing and infrastructure, Miguel Pinto Luz, also spoke.
In this case, it was even possible to bring forward the award by two months, but the prime minister took the opportunity to refer critically to the public procurement rules.
"The rules of public procurement are, in fact, very demanding today and sometimes even somewhat disconnected from the real flow of life in a country. I have no problem saying this as prime minister, we are looking at how we can streamline procedures, we are looking at how we can simplify procedures, guaranteeing transparency, guaranteeing the fairness and legality of decisions, but not wasting time, fighting bureaucracy," he said.
Luís Montenegro considered that excessive bureaucracy "is an evil that, unfortunately, is widespread throughout Europe", but that "in Portugal it is still taken further than much that is already taken in Europe".
"We will also try to make a positive contribution in this area so that in the short term we will be able to have shorter decision-making and materialisation processes that don't waste so much time and so many years," he said.
The prime minister argued that the government has done everything in its power to speed up the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (the EU bazooka funds for post pandemic economic recovery) and to make it simpler and, specifically with regard to the award announced today, he welcomed the fact that it had been possible to save time, but left a message for the future.
"We're gaining two months here, but I hope we can gain more, I hope that the public organisations that still have a contribution to make are also quick. We don't want to overstep the rules, we don't want to overstep what is legal compliance, but it's important that everyone contributes, it's important that the Court of Auditors doesn't eternalise the prior approval of the contract," he said.
The prime minister argued that his words were not ‘a pressure mechanism’, but "the realisation of a need and a reality" regarding this high-speed rail project and other major public works.
On the awarding of this first phase of the high-speed railway project, Montenegro thanked everyone who has worked on it since the 1990s, although he also left some criticisms about the delay in launching it.
"There was a lot of political hesitation in this process, it's possible, there were advances and resources also in the country's economic and financial conditions to be able to financially leverage the launch of projects that we've been hearing about for several decades, it's true," he said, but he once again pointed to excessive bureaucracy as one of the biggest obstacles that the government wants to solve.
In contrast, the prime minister defended the fact that the current PSD/CDS-PP government never had any doubts about the high-speed rail project, just like with other infrastructures such as the future Lisbon airport.
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Lusa
