Portugal gets the coveted Financial Services portfolio

Maria Luís Albuquerque must now be grilled and approved by the European Parliament before she takes the European Commission post.

What?

Maria Luís Albuquerque, a former Portuguese Finance Minister, has been selected as the European Commission’s new Financial Services commissioner.

The economic portfolio is widely viewed as one of the more influential posts in the EU. Albuquerque will succeed Mairead McGuinness, who has served as the financial services commissioner since September 2020.

Tell me more

As PORTUGAL DECODED reported a few weeks ago, Albuquerque, 56, was Portugal’s Finance Minister between 2013 and 2015.

Her tenure coincided with one of the most economically difficult periods in Portugal’s history as it struggled during the euro zone debt crisis.

She is viewed as having helped steer through reforms that reassured the country’s creditors and helped its economy start to recover.

An economist by training with years of experience in her country’s treasury, Albuquerque has also worked as a lecturer and political advisor.

Following the 2014 European elections, Albuquerque was believed to be a strong candidate for Portugal’s commissioner.

However, she lost out to party colleague Carlos Moedas.

She left political office in 2015 following her party’s general election defeat and became a non-executive director at UK capital management firm Arrow Global.

In 2022, she started working for Morgan Stanley Europe. 

What happens next?

First, the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee will scrutinise the declaration of interests of each Commissioner-designate.

Second, each Commissioner-designate appears before the competent parliamentary committee or committees for a single confirmation hearing.

In the past, the main criticism levelled at some of the Commissioners-designate has involved their having insufficient expertise in their respective portfolios, as well as the vagueness of their answers and their reluctance to make political commitments.

The existence of possible conflicts of interest in relation to the assigned portfolio and concerns regarding the integrity of the candidate have influenced the dynamics of more recent hearings.

According to POLITICO, hearings could start on Oct. 14 or Nov. 4, but may not happen until Dec. 1 or even delayed further if commissioners wobble in Parliament.

How is Albuquerque expected to fare?

The Members of the European Parliament are likely to examine her previous corporate work and the privatisation of TAP, the Portuguese national airline, during her tenure as finance minister from 2013 to 2015.

Brussels-based corporate watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) said Albuquerque’s nomination was a “major conflict of interest”, noting that she had moved from her Finance Minister post to work in a UK-based agency that handled €300m of bad debts linked to Banif, a Portuguese bank bailed out in 2015.

Portuguese MEPs from the Left Bloc and the Communist Party on Tuesday acknowledged a conflict of interest for Maria Luís Albuquerque because she has worked in the private sector. The Socialist Party expressed concern, while the IL, Chega, CDS and PSD supported the decision.

Those concerns have been brushed off by von der Leyen, who on Wednesday told reporters that “It strengthens the position of Maria Albuquerque” that she’d had private sector experience, something the Commission chief said was “very important.”

So far, she has not been named as one of the nominees most likely to get the chop in the European Parliament.

What will be she actually do as Financial Services Commissioner?

If she’s successful, Albuquerque would succeed Ireland’s Mairead McGuinness in charge of the Commission's financial-services department DG FISMA, pushing through some long-stalled reforms intended to build up the bloc’s capital markets union and safeguard its banking system. 

She'll have to introduce an EU-wide savings product and scale up green finance – although the task of introducing a digital version of the euro has now been handed to Latvia's Valdis Dombrovskis. 

Here’s her mission letter.

Sources: Euronews, POLITICO