Bloomberg/Lisbon


Four months ago, few in Portugal had heard of Mariana Mortagua.
The 28-year-old member of the Left Bloc, Portugal’s equivalent to Greece’s anti-austerity Syriza party, has been catapulted into the limelight with her single-minded pursuit of those responsible for the country’s biggest corporate collapse in a generation. Her pithy and direct questioning in a parliamentary inquiry into the failure of Banco Espirito Santo and a group of associated family-controlled businesses has made her something of a local hero.
“She’s managed to express the frustration people feel towards a small elite that used to run the country’s financial system for decades,” said Antonio Costa Pinto, a professor of political science at the University of Lisbon. “It has to do with her style of asking short, tough questions in a country where people are usually more subtle.”
In her quest, Mortagua is targeting the country’s rich and powerful — former Banco Espirito Santo chief executive officer Ricardo Salgado and other members of the Espirito Santo family and executives who ran the bank, Bank of Portugal Governor Carlos Costa and Henrique Granadeiro, the former chief executive officer of Portugal Telecom SGPS SA, which failed to recover almost €900mn ($989mn) invested in Grupo Espirito Santo debt.
“For the first time we are able to confront a group of people who were almost untouchable and ask them tough questions at these hearings,” Mortagua said in an interview on March 12. “I think people have been shocked by what they’ve seen.”
Portugal completed a three-year international rescue programme last year, only to find itself bailing out Banco Espirito Santo to the tune of €4.9bn three months later. Many Espirito Santo family holding companies that relied on the bank to borrow money have now gone bankrupt.
With the questioning of Portuguese Finance Minister Maria Luis Albuquerque — whose government lent money for the bailout of what was once Portugal’s largest listed bank — for the second time on Wednesday, the inquiry has entered its 18th week.
Mortagua, who holds a degree in economics from a university in Lisbon, has for months been sifting through the wreckage of Banco Espirito Santo and a complex web of assets linked to the prominent Espirito Santo family, ranging from a hotel chain in Portugal, a diamond mine in Angola and a farm in Paraguay.
“I used to stay awake until 3am or 4am trying to put all the pieces together,” said Mortagua, who is often seen walking around Portugal’s Parliament building in a dark outfit and Converse All-Star sneakers.
Her homework has paid off. The average daily viewership of Portugal’s Parliament Channel, which broadcasts the hearings, rose 45% in the first two months of this year compared to the same period in 2014, according to market research company Mediamonitor and GFK. A YouTube video featuring Mortagua during the inquiry received more than 200,000 hits. Her Facebook page won’t allow any new friend requests after reaching the 5,000 limit.
“I’m starting to get worried,” said Mortagua. The interview with Bloomberg, which took place in Lisbon’s parliament building, was delayed by 30 minutes because she said her agenda was “overbooked.”
Mortagua has come a long way since her childhood in Alvito, a town in Portugal’s southern Alentejo region, one of the poorest areas in Western Europe, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office.
While Mortagua only became a lawmaker for the Left Bloc in 2013, politics is in her blood. She is the daughter of Camilo Mortagua, who along with a handful of other political activists in 1961 forced the pilot of a TAP flight from Casablanca to Lisbon to fly in circles over the Portuguese capital as they dropped thousands of leaflets calling for an end to the right-wing dictatorship of Antonio Salazar.
Her twin sister, Joana Mortagua, is also a member of the Left Bloc party.
While Mortagua has seen her popularity rise since the Espirito Santo inquiry began in November, her Left Bloc party has failed to mirror gains by other anti-austerity groups in Europe. The Left Bloc, which wants Portugal to restructure its debt and end austerity, had 4.4% backing from voters in a survey published by newspaper Expresso on March 13.
In Greece, Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza won general elections in January on a platform of rejecting more spending cuts. Spain’s anti-austerity Podemos party is leading opinion polls before an election due by the end of the year. Portugal is also scheduled to hold elections in September or October.
“It’s hard to explain,” Mortagua said. Portugal, as opposed to Greece, which was occupied by the Germans, was a colonizer and so “we don’t have those antibodies,” she said.
For now, Mortagua says she’s fighting for ordinary people who became victims of the excesses of the Espirito Santo group.
On the day of the interview, protesters occupied a branch of Novo Banco SA in northern Portugal, demanding repayment of Grupo Espirito Santo commercial paper sold by branches of the former Banco Espirito Santo. The Bank of Portugal in August placed the rescued lender’s deposits and most of its assets into the newly-created Novo Banco, now for sale.
“I get lots of e-mails from people who lost all their money. Justice has to be served,” said Mortagua.
Mortagua’s work has managed to expose some of the things that were wrong in Portuguese business, said Pedro Pintassilgo, a fund manager at F&C Management Ltd.
“She has studied the subject very well and has shown herself to be a good representative of Portuguese citizens,” said Pintassilgo, who manages about €38mn invested in Portuguese stocks through F&C in Lisbon. “While I don’t share her political views, I admire her professionalism, competence and hard work.”
When Salgado, once branded the owner of everything, went before the parliamentary inquiry on Dec. 9, he indicated that regulators and the financial crisis contributed to the collapse of Banco Espirito Santo and Grupo Espirito Santo.
Mortagua wasn’t impressed.
“It’s curious that the owner of everything has appeared before us today as the victim of everything,” she said. “Mr. Salgado wants to convince us that his empire crumbled and that the man in charge of that empire had nothing to do with it.”
Salgado said in parliament on March 19 that he had always acted in the best interest of the bank, and while admitting he may have made mistakes said he was going to fight to defend his honour and that of his family.
While the inquiry has no legal mandate, what is said during hearings can be used in court, according to Mortagua. That may help explain why many former executives at Banco Espirito Santo and Grupo Espirito Santo have said they don’t know or can’t recall certain things, she said.
Mortagua, who relies on an assistant to research the inner workings of Banco Espirito Santo and Grupo Espirito Santo, says it’s rational for some people who appear in the hearings to deny any wrongdoing or claim they have forgotten certain things.
“They are protecting themselves,” she said. “But it’s very hard not to feel a little impatient, revolted or even outraged because we share the same feelings as those people watching us at home.”