TAP Air Portugal tips

Keeping Lisbon’s airport hub and safeguarding TAP’s strategic role for Portugal will be key conditions of the airline’s upcoming privatization, more than the sale price, the government said on Wednesday.

Marking its twentieth anniversary, TAP Air Portugal’s Prague-Lisbon route celebrated significant milestones with 1.4 million passengers and a festive event featuring a special Airbus A321neo at Václav Havel Airport.

Portugal’s Finance Minister Fernando Medina kicked off the long-awaited sale of TAP Air Portugal Thursday with the announcement that the government would sell a 51% stake in the state-owned airline to the highest bidder.

A former owner of Portugal’s flag carrier TAP, David Neeleman, denied on Friday making a deal in 2015 to overpay for Airbus planes after prosecutors said last month they were investigating the complex leasing deal, as well as suggestions he had bought TAP shares with company money.

Portugal’s government has sacked the CEO of the state-owned airline TAP in the wake of a scandal involving an irregular severance payment of €500,000 ($532,945) to a former executive board member, finance minister Fernando Medina said on Monday.

Portugal’s state holding company Parpublica has hired Ernst & Young and Portuguese bank Banco Finantia to determine the value of state-owned airline TAP ahead of its privatisation, it said on Tuesday.

Portugal’s state-owned airline TAP carried 7.58 million passengers in the first half of this year, a 30% increase from a year ago but still slightly below pre-pandemic levels even as tourist numbers have already exceeded those seen in 2019.

The privatization of Portugal’s state-owned airline TAP will take place before October instead of starting in July as the government had originally planned, Infrastructure Minister Joao Galamba said.