The Aviation and Airports Workers Union (SITAVA) believes “the Government deceived the workers once and is now trying to do it again,” said the union’s spokesperson, Paulo Duarte.
“Our perception is that not a single share will be subscribed. In fact, I dare say that the Government knows this perfectly well and even desires it, so the new shareholder gets the 49%,” he added.
The president of the National Civil Aviation Flight Personnel Union (SNPVAC), Ricardo Penarroias, stated that the issue of the 5% “is not relevant or a priority,” but asserted that excluding workers is “another indication of the Government’s intention to remove them from the process.”
“Moreover, we consider this exclusion a measure to attract interested parties from outside Europe,” he pointed out.
Ricardo Penarroias recalled that they have been critical of how this process is being conducted, “notably due to the absence of union participation, the timing of its execution, and, of course, the lack of guarantees and safeguards concerning the interest of the company, the country, and jobs.”
The official further revealed that “so far, there has been no contact from associates expressing interest in acquiring shares of the company.”
The Civil Aviation Pilots’ Union (SPAC) also deemed it “unacceptable” that the terms, which “offer substantial tax benefits to the reference investor — through accumulated tax credits (around 487 million euros) and the loss carryforward regime — now remove the historically granted 5% discount to workers.”
“This situation represents a revolting asymmetry: denying workers a modest 5% benefit on a portion that does not exceed 5% of the capital while offering years of tax relief to the buyer worth multiples of that discount,” said Frederico Saraiva de Almeida, vice-president of the union’s board.
“TAP workers, who are also taxpayers, bore the greatest sacrifices during the restructuring — with salary cuts over 60% among pilots — to make the operation viable,” he recalled.
According to the leader, “demand for the 5% without a discount will naturally be reduced,” considering it “an exercise in cynicism to ask workers to buy at the same price as the investor after they were the first to bear the cost of the company’s recovery.”
The SPAC further stressed it is “particularly revolting” that the Government “does not use this reprivatization process to compensate workers for the lost investment in the harmony operation of 2022, which eliminated the 5% of TAP SGPS capital they had held since 2015, now forcing them to repurchase it without a discount, which they already owned and was taken from them.”
“The Government, thus, turns a participation instrument into a mere symbolic formality, contravening the spirit of the Privatization Framework Law and the precedents of TAP itself,” he added.
As reported, the Government justified the measure of not including a discount for workers in the share purchase with the need to protect the 3.2 billion euros invested by taxpayers in TAP.
In previous privatization processes, there was a 5% discount, absent in the current terms.
The document, published Monday evening in the Diário da República, provides for the direct sale of 44.9% of the company’s share capital and stipulates that up to 5% of the share capital can be acquired by workers. The unsubscribed portion will pass to the private investor assuming the shareholder position.
