Boss of Portugal’s overseas investment and export bureau was fired over the phone

The former president of Portugal’s export and overseas investment bureau AICEP, Ricardo Arroja, was fired by telephone after having received an e-mail two hours prior from the minister of the Economy’s office telling him not to show up at a scheduled work meeting.

The Minister of Economy, Manuel Castro Almeida, in the first meeting he had with Ricardo Arroja, informed him that he wanted to have someone with a different profile at the helm of AICEP. However, the then president of the agency considered that he should not resign because there were no “reasons to justify it”, he says in written responses sent to socialist deputies sitting on the parliamentary Economy Committee.

The PS quizzed Ricardo Arroja about the moment in which he was removed and how since his term had been “interrupted without any substantive public grounds for terminating his term.”

“The decision was justified only by the intention of “imprinting a new dynamic on (AICEP) services using existing teams”, which raises questions about the criteria effectively followed by the government, the stability of leadership at the agency, and the continuity of its action”, said PS deputies during the hearing .

“On my dismissal, I was informed by the office of the minister of Economy and Territorial Cohesion e Coesão Territorial, through a phone call from that office to my office in Lisbon at around 3pm, hours after having been told via e-mail at 1pm not to attend a work meeting that had been set up for the beginning of that same afternoon”, recalled Ricardo Arroja.

Ricardo Arroja in his replies to the Economy Committee said that he had fulfilled all of the targets given to him and had never been subjected to a any formal performance evaluation during his term.

The Minister of the Economy replaced Ricardo Arroja with Madalena Oliveira e Silva who was already one of the agency’s senior management figures.

HUGO DELGADO/LUSA
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