Ports Case 3 - Government non-supervision

"The Madeira Chamber of Commerce, ACIF", according to the Police Report (p1284), "carried out a study, whose main conclsuions, made public in 2001, indicate that 'the Port of Funchal was, substancially, the most expensive of Portugal (and even generally in Europe.)'"

The Analytical Unit of the Public Prosecutor's Office (NAT), relating to Government Supervision states:

Since the competitiveness of the ports is of strategic importance to the national economy, namely in what concerns port operations, the activity of offering services of cargo movement to the public, carried out by OPM, is considered to be of public interest, meaning that this company is especially obliged to "cooperate in the establishment of technical and administrative means to improve the port services, in terms of optimising costs and price transparency,---" (paragraph d) nº2, article 19 of the Decree Law 298/93, which established the legal regime of the ports operations.

In this context, and taking into consideration the powers of the ports authority, the NAT suggested that an information request be made to the APRAM - Administration of the Portso fo the Autonomous Region of Madeira, S.A., to clarify the way in which this entity exerted the power attributed to it of oversight and supervision and what guidelines may have been established, for the ETP and OPM, in terms of prices charged. In its answer, the APRAM merely recognised that, during the period considered in this investigation, "it had no intervention, nor did it set any guidelines on the matter of prices charged for the services rendered by the ERP/RAM or the OPM."

In this way, faced with the absence of the regulating and supervision role of the ports authority, and the OPM being the only stowage company operating tn the Ports of Madeira, the absence of competition has contributed to the prices that it is free to practice being the highest in Portugal, according to the comparative study of the ACIF.