The Minister of State and Foreign Affairs, Paulo Rangel, maintained this Friday that a prime minister “cannot be heard without authorization from the Supreme Court of Justice” and that even this must be very carefully considered.
“Not commenting on any specific case, there is a principle that is evident and abstract (…) a prime minister cannot be heard without authorization from the Supreme Court of Justice, period. And even that has to be very well considered before being authorized”, he declared.
Stating that he did not want to comment on specific cases, Rangel, a jurist, argued that “there are matters in which the Court has to consider the consequences of what it is doing” and considered that “authorizing the listening of a prime minister is always an enormous constitutional delicacy” that “requires a very serious consideration“.
Horacio Villalobos
“Judicial authorization must be given with what we call in English ‘self-restraint’, self-restraint. It must be something exceptional and duly justified and, therefore, there must be very weighty reasons for it. And, in addition, there cannot be wiretapping of prime ministers without competent judicial authorization, that cannot be”, he stressed.
According to this Friday’s edition of the newspaper News Diary22 contacts were tapped between António Costa and the defendants in Operation Influencer João Galamba (then Deputy Secretary of State for Energy and Secretary of State for the Environment for Energy), Lacerda Machado (friend and consultant to the Government in the privatization of TAP, for example) and Matos Fernandes (former Minister for the Environment and Climate Action).
This Friday, the Attorney General’s Office said, in a statement, that, recently, “in the course of a new analysis of all wiretaps carried out” within the scope of Operation Influencer, seven wiretaps were identified, “in which Prime Minister António Costa was also involved, a fact that, for various technical reasons, had not been initially detected”. Of these seven wiretaps, six were contact attempts, the PGR said in the same statement, stressing that “all telephone wiretaps carried out within the scope of these processes [Operação Influencer]without any exception, were timely submitted for periodic control to the Investigating Judge of the Central Criminal Instruction Court (TCIC)”.
The seven wiretaps in question “were immediately brought to the attention of the president of the STJ, through the investigating judge of the TCIC”, with the president of the STJ considering in an order “he is no longer competent to provide such knowledge as António Costa is not currently prime minister”. The Attorney General’s Office also once again highlighted that António Costa was never the target of direct wiretapping or surveillance – neither when he held the position of Prime Minister, nor when he left the Government.
“Incidentally, as part of the wiretapping carried out on other people, communications were detected in which Prime Minister António Costa was involved”, clarified the PGR, adding that these wiretaps were always known to the president of the Supreme Court of Justice.
The wiretaps were carried out between 2020 and 2022 and the contacts in question included João Galamba, then Deputy Secretary of State for Energy and Secretary of State for the Environment and Energy, Lacerda Machado, friend and former consultant to the Government in the privatization of TAP, and João Pedro Matos Fernandes, at the time Minister for the Environment and Climate Action, according to Diário de Notícias.