Prime Minister guarantees CP as “trave master” in the railway operation

“ Nos that we defend an increasingly free market, liberalized even, where competition stimulates competence, capacity, the result, we never fail to say, nor will we fail to affirm, that CP is the fundamental axis, it is master of the system ", said today Luís Montenegro at the ceremony of launching the first stone of the new Alstom train assembly factory in the complex of Guifons, Matosinhos.

The head of the government made these statements after having announced, at the PSD Congress on 21st, that the Cascais line, Lisbon district, will be the first to be sub-concessionated to private, in a context in which studies have already been commissioned by CP to evaluate the possible sub-concession of other suburban lines in Lisbon and Porto.

Speaking about Alstom’s factory, an investment of 26.8 million euros in conjunction with the Portuguese STD that will serve to assemble 81 of the 153 trains of the contract of 1,064 million euros signed between CP – Trains of Portugal and the French multinational, Montenegro recalled that “this day was not to happen”.

“ It was not to happen for one of those [things] which is an embarrassment, a problem, a reason, that we are very committed to overcoming so that in the future we do not have to live again the dramas that this competition process lived until we got here”, he stressed, referring to

The competition was launched in 2021, still in the government of António Costa (PS) and with Pedro Nuno Santos as Minister of Infrastructure, and awarded in 2023, but was still in court for several years due to disputes of the various competitors.

According to the Prime Minister, the current legal regime of public procurement has meant that, “at a certain point, a result of a competition has been called into question – this is legitimate – but by this it had interrupted a whole procedure”.

“ With this, [made] us lose time simultaneously, and here time is really money,” he said, recalling that CP lost EUR 191 million in European funds due to delays.

Then, “when the legal issues were resolved,” the basic price that had been contracted, of EUR 764 million, “was out of date”, highlighting Luís Montenegro’s work on the work of the Minister of Infrastructure and Housing, Miguel Pinto Luz, in the resolution of the “imbroglio” that gave “many political and legal work” to be resolved.

“I leave this reflection here only to encourage the country to accompany us in this drive that we feel increasingly robust and consolidated to combat bureaucracy, to combat overregulation, to change the legal regime of public procurement so that the public interest can prevail,” said Luís Montenegro.

According to the Prime Minister, “the public interest here did not prevail with these rules”.

“ We country have been harmed. Portuguese citizens have been harmed. The Portuguese taxpayers were financially affected by this scheme. And it didn’t have to be like this,” he said.