Luís Parreirão defends Jorge Coelho after Moedas' words
Luís Parreirão, former Secretary of State for Public Works, criticized this Wednesday the way Carlos Moedas referred to former minister Jorge Coelho about the collapse of the Entre-os-Rios bridge, considering that “painful circumstances lead to situations of loss of control”.
“Painful circumstances can lead us to situations of lack of control, confusion, madness, or even to practices or speeches that, after the circumstances have passed, we realize were wrong,” said former Secretary of State Jorge Coelho, in an opinion piece published this Wednesday in Correio da Manhã .
The former Secretary of State refers to an allegation made on Sunday , during an interview with SIC, by the Mayor of Lisbon about the causes of the accident with the Glória elevator , which caused 16 deaths and several injuries, that Jorge Coelho, now deceased, resigned as Minister of Social Equipment because he had received information in his office that pointed to the fragility of the Entre-os-Rios bridge before the 2001 accident.
In that interview, Carlos Moedas rejected the comparison and said that Jorge Coelho's office had received information that pointed to the bridge's fragility even before the accident, while, in his case, he had not received any signal to that effect in relation to the Elevador da Glória.
In his opinion piece, Luís Parreirão emphasized that “unfortunately, the Mayor of Lisbon felt that the best way to address the tragedy that befell the capital was to bring Jorge Coelho's behavior 24 years ago into the debate.”
In Luís Parreirão's understanding, “whatever [Carlos Moedas] does, there is no remission.”
Luís Parreirão recalled that at the time of the accident, parliament created a Commission of Inquiry and the Attorney General's Office conducted a criminal investigation, with no responsibility being attributed to Jorge Coelho.
The article also recalls that after the accident, a case took place in the Castelo de Paiva Court, a case to which Jorge Coelho was never called.
“As people say, 'lies have short legs' and, in this case, they only embarrass the person who wrote them,” he writes.
“The then minister Jorge Coelho, and with him myself, who was his Secretary of State, understood that the only way forward was to resign,” he said, emphasizing that this was an objective political responsibility.
“That night, no one took personal and subjective responsibility, for the simple reason that they did not exist, as Parliament and the Attorney General's Office confirmed,” he said.
On Tuesday, Moedas, at the end of the Municipal Assembly session where a motion of censure was rejected, attempted to retract what he had said about Jorge Coelho. "My intention was not to offend, but to honor that man's courage and his political responsibility at the right time," the mayor said, not wanting to "further fuel the issue."
An hour earlier on the same day, the current President of the European Council, António Costa, and other former ministers of António Guterres, then Prime Minister, accused Carlos Moedas of having said “falsehoods” about the late former Socialist leader Jorge Coelho.
"We, Jorge Coelho's colleagues in António Guterres' government at the time of the Entre-os-Rios bridge collapse, wish to express our outrage at the false claims made by engineer Carlos Moedas about what happened in 2001. Jorge Coelho's actions were an important contribution to the defense of democracy over the past 25 years," former ministers of António Guterres wrote in a note sent to the agency.
In addition to former Prime Minister António Costa, the note was signed by Alberto Martins, Augusto Santos Silva, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, Guilherme Oliveira Martins, Luís Capoulas Santos and Nuno Severiano Teixeira.
“Since Jorge Coelho cannot defend himself, it is our duty to defend his memory,” they emphasize.
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