“Scandalous is the right word to define these profits. Today we got to know from the first semester data that banks gain 11 million euros a day in profits,” Mariana Mortágua reacted.

“All the banks loudly increased their profits, the BCP gaining most – two billion euros in the first semester of the year alone – and these profits have a very basic cause: they’re the result and the reverse of the increase of interest rates on family housing loans,” she pointed out.

In this sense, she defended that “the solution to families being alleviated of housing debt” is in “the banks abdicating a small part of their profits, allowing them to lower interest rates.”

“Today we got to find out not only that profits for the first semester are 11 million euros a day, but that mortgages increased 80% for people with housing loans, and this is Portugal we live in,” she doubled down.

Mariana Mortágua reminded that “the banks were cleaned with State money,” highlighting the case of Novo Banco which she considered “scandalous,” as they “received a guarantee of four billion euros of public money.”

Or rather, she continued, they “were saved with public money and now are funnelling hundreds of millions in profit to their private shareholders by increasing interest rates and impoverishing the Portuguese population.”

Over what she considered a “scandal” and “assault” on the people with housing loans, Mariana Mortágua said that what she sees the President and Prime Minister doing about it is “asking” the banks for “a bit of sympathy” and “understanding.”

“This isn’t how this problem is going to be solved. We need to create measures that force the banks to lower housing loan rates in response to their profits,” the head of BE demanded.

To journalists, Mariana Mortágua defended that “we need to invest more in the fire service and forest management” in a comment towards the declarations made by the president of the Rural Wildfire Integrated Management Agency (AGIF), Tiago Almeida, who said that local councils “invest a lot of money in the firemen.”

“I think of that statement as part of a mistake, the idea that faced with a risk as great as wildfires, we must take from one side to add to another, and so pull the rug out from under the firemen to give to forestry or pull it from under forestry to give to the firemen,” she pondered.

In that sense, Mariana Mortágua said that “the rug, perhaps, is just too short and maybe we need to invest in the firemen and in forestry,” since “firefighters act preventatively and in wildfire situations” and “forestry management is essential for prevention.”

“I presume and interpret those words as a call to attention to the lack of investment in forest management, in no instance did I understand that too much money is spent on the fire service, I think that’s a mistaken idea.”