It was three days before Christmas 2021 when Pedro Nuno Santos, then minister of Infrastructure and Housing, announced that the European Commission had approved TAP's restructuring plan, which involved authorized state aid of 3.2 billion euros. The government official explained that the intervention would be carried out in two modalities: at the restructuring level and at the covid-19 compensation level.
The merits and defects of the restructuring plan were the subject of intense political debate in the years following its execution, serving as a weapon of attack between different political forces.
However, the article indicates that there now appears to be a consensus, at least between PS and AD (the so-called "governance arc"), that TAP has overcome the financial nightmare caused by the pandemic and managed to be effectively restructured.
The article's title suggests that the company has gone from a scenario of strong state intervention to a process of potential privatization, in a kind of "rollercoaster" of the Portuguese air carrier's accounts.
