Luxury and hunger in Portimão

A pair of storks in their nest atop a tall brick chimney towering above what used to be a sardine factory and is now a major convention centre, looked down without expression as the grandly titled ‘Carnival of Luxury’ came to an ignominious end.

Designed to attract the rich and famous, it had been billed as the “ultimate lifestyle fair being hosted for the first time in Portugal.” It was supposed to be a celebration of “opulence, decadence, entertainment.” It turned out to be a flop.

The same pair of storks could gaze across to the opposite bank of the river Arade and the bankrupt town of Portimão, reputedly the most indebted municipality in the country, with its rows of abandoned shops. On the last day of the Carnival, the Portimão Soup Kitchen was serving meals to many hungry and homeless citizens.

It seemed repugnant to many that an exhibition of opulence should be staged in such a depressed location in one of Europe’s poorest countries at a time of crippling unemployment and austerity.

The Carnival of Luxury failed, say its critics, because the organisers, a company called Vida de Luxe based in Malta and Hong Kong, badly overestimated the number of companies wanting to exhibit their sumptuous wares and the number of visitors willing to pay an entrance fee of €50.

And then there were the exaggerations. Early on, the official website trumpeted that former US president Bill Clinton would be attending as a VIP guest. Not only had he not agreed to come, he had not even been formally asked, according to a reliable source. Right to the end, the website said the VIP guest list included John Roberts Jr, US Supreme Court Chief Justice. One of the sponsors admitted that no one that important showed up.

Apart from the organisers and the relatively small number of exhibitors, few were surprised that the event flopped. It seemed doomed from the start.

The opening gala dinner attracted less than a quarter of the hoped-for crowd of well-heeled bon vivants. Even though the €50 entrance fee for ordinary visitors was quickly dropped altogether, not many people showed any interest in looking around for free. One of the most prominent exhibitors, with half a million euros worth of exquisite silverware on show, said, “I had only two potential buyers and sold nothing.”

Exhibitors started packing up early. “Business Monday” was cancelled. The planned five-day spectacular closed amid humiliation and rancour after day four.

Meanwhile, the Portimão Soup Kitchen across the way continued to serve meals to people in desperate need. When a few International Christian Fellowship volunteers set up the kitchen three years ago, they began by feeding 12 to 14 people once a week. The need has greatly escalated and now 20 volunteers, backed by other outside helpers, feed up to 95 people three times a week.

The age of those benefiting from the service ranges from seven to seventy. Most of the people who come are Portuguese, but there are also migrant workers from the Ukraine, Moldavia, Romania, Czech Republic. Some are completely homeless and sleep rough in abandoned buildings or wherever they can find a place to shelter. Others have somewhere to stay but no money to buy food.

“If we had more funds and more volunteers we might be able to open another day of the week,” says Joy Borgan, one of the founders of the soup kitchen.

“Last Sunday someone came to the kitchen about an hour after we had closed and we were mopping the floor ready to lock up. He told us he had not eaten that day or the day before. Even though we had already fed almost 80 people and had been standing for several hours and were tired and ready to go home, how could we turn him away? How could we not continue to help people when there is such a need in Portimão?”

* If anyone would like to help or be involved with the Portimão Soup Kitchen in any way, please contact Joy Borgan on 91 735 8098 or 282 04 28 36, or email <joy@borgan.info>

25th April 1974 - then and now

The revolution of 25th April 1974 transformed the political and social set-up and gave great hope to the people of Portugal. Thirty-nine years on, hope is in short supply. It has evaporated in the face of the intractable economic crisis. What has gone wrong?

During the decade before 1974, the country was still relatively underdeveloped with poor infrastructures and inefficient agriculture, but growth rates for GDP were among the highest in Europe. By 1973, the on-going colonial wars were exacting a heavy toll in terms of financial cost and in promoting mass emigration among the better educated and most technically skilled who wanted to avoid conscription.

 The ‘Carnation Revolution’ replaced dictatorship with democracy. It also led to a succession of economically inept governments and a litany of mismanagement, corruption and greed that has brought the country to the edge of bankruptcy.

In the aftermath of the military coup, the nationalisation of banks and industries and the expropriation of agricultural estates led to collapse across all sectors of the economy.

The 1980s saw a return to economic and social stability of sorts. After joining the European Union in 1986, trade ties increased, structural and cohesion funds flowed in, and tourism took over from farming and fishing as the main economic activity in the south of the country.

Living standards continued to rise and prosperity spread among an expanding middle class in the 1990s. On 1st January 2001, Portugal adopted the euro. In the five years that followed, household debt expanded, unemployment increased and GDP growth dropped to the lowest of any country on the continent.

At the beginning of 2010, Portugal joined Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain in a full-blown debt crisis that the Socialist government of José Sócrates was unable to bring under control. One of its last acts in 2011 was to apply for a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.

As the centre-right government of Pedro Passos Coelho struggles to repay the €78 billion bailout, a need for a second mega loan may be looming. Some analysts insist Passos Coelho has lost his way in a mission impossible - that the debt burden is such that Portugal will never be able to pay it off. If that is the case, what is point of trying?

Among those who hold that opinion is Mário Soares, an arch critic of the dictatorship who rose to prominence immediately after the revolution. The former Socialist leader and now elder statesman said recently in a radio interview: “No matter how much [the government] impoverishes people or steals from their pensions, the state will never be able to pay back what it owes. When you can’t pay, the only solution is not to pay.”

He is urging all left-of-centre political forces to bring down the present government and repudiate the austerity measures demanded by the IMF-EU troika of lenders. 

Before the Carnation Revolution, people all across the country were restive and hungry for change. They are again. Contempt for authority is being fuelled by the collapse of many businesses, rising costs and austerity measures that are impacting on education, employment and health, causing widespread suffering, especially among young families, the elderly and the poor.

Proposals for even more severe austerity are infuriating vociferous opponents who increasingly see the present government as taking on the mantle of a dictatorship.

Portugal could be on the verge of another pivotal transition. It is unlikely to be as dramatic as a military coup. It is the people not the army who are in the forefront of the demand for change this time.

Amid the current paucity of hope, street protests in what is being described as a “historic day of struggle” are planned for May 1. 

Odd weather - and likely to get odder

By our standards, here in the far south of Portugal it had been a long, wet winter. Then suddenly, from one day to the next at the end of last week, spring finally burst forth.

Bee-eaters, our most flamboyantly coloured nesting birds, have returned

from Africa and are hawking for insects in the radiant blue sky. The Golden Orioles are back too, flashing through the lush green woodlands. Cuckoos announced their arrival in the drizzle a few weeks ago - now they won’t shut up. It’s mid-April and the countryside is awash with outrageous orchids and other wildflowers galore.

What a change from the month of March, which had been as miserable as most could remember. Portugal and Spain had floods. It was the coldest March in the UK since 1962. It was the coldest in Germany since their records began in the 1880s. More than 100,000 people in Poland spent the Easter weekend without electricity after heavy snow dragged down power lines. Extreme conditions prevailed all across the continent.

Meteorologists explained that the jet stream had been operating much further south than usual. As a result, the Mediterranean countries experienced the early spring weather normally associated with northern Europe. Only lately did the jet stream head northwards, bringing a return to more typical spring weather.

As we in the Algarve happily cast off our woollies as temperatures shot up towards the high 20s, the soothsayers began forecasting a scorcher of a summer.

One thing for sure, climate change is happening, influenced by humans or not. International participants attending a major conference on the subject in Dublin this week warned that unless properly addressed, global warming will lead to widespread famine and, yes, even more crippling economic and social problems.

Numerous studies predict that average temperatures in Europe generally will rise this century by up to 6º higher than they were in the 1980s. The warming in summer is expected to be greatest in Portugal and other countries in the Mediterranean climatic zone.  

Average summer temperatures in Lisbon and the Algarve, for example, may rise from 28º t0 34º, with a noticeable increase by 2030 in the number of days exceeding 40ºC. 

Rainfall is expected to decrease on the Portuguese mainland this century by between 20% and 40%. The Azores is unlikely to be so dramatically affected, but precipitation in Madeira could plummet by 30% even though temperature increases there may be only of the order of 2º or 3º. 

The outlook is being analysed by the European Centre for Climate Adaptation (ECCA), which constantly monitors what a large number of international research organisations and scientific journals are saying on the subject.

“The Algarve could be negatively affected by climate change,” states the ECCA, meaning it may become a less attractive place to live or visit in both environmental and economic terms. Higher average temperatures, an increase in the frequency of droughts, heat waves and outbreaks of forest fires will induce greater risks of soil erosion. Desertification may become irreversible.

Such a scenario would mean dramatic changes in the landscape and biodiversity of southern Portugal. While some traditional crops may cease to be productive, there may be increases in tick and mosquito-borne diseases, including a possible re-emergence of malaria. Water shortages may restrict the operation of tourist facilities such as swimming pools and golf courses.

Of course, some dismiss the science of climate change and talk of our vulnerability as mere conjecture and therefore not worthy of taking seriously. Others have simply no interest.

Only slowly is climate change entering the decision-making of governments, investors and tourist enterprises in Europe, says the ECCA. “Studies that have examined the climate change risk appraisal of local tourism officials and operators have consistently found relatively low levels of concern and little evidence of long-term strategic planning in anticipation of future changes in climate.”

It suggests  that, “in Portugal, the aim should be to direct tourist flows firstly towards the off-peak season, and secondly to the northern part of the country, in which tourism is still relatively underdeveloped.”

 Meanwhile, here in the sun-blessed far south, the spring of 2o13 could not be lovelier.

Portugal seeks to fill fiscal black hole

Incredibly, Portugal has plunged from being a role model in its handling of the debit crisis to a potential basket case that may have to go begging for a second bailout. Some analysts say events here could instigate even worse and wider mayhem elsewhere in the eurozone.

The current international spotlight on the life of Margaret Thatcher provides a poignant reminder that the recent turn of events in Portugal is totally in line with the Iron Lady’s scepticism about European economic and monetary union.

Writing in the Guardian, business reporter Graeme Wearden managed to put a lighter spin on things: “No sooner had Cyprus been whisked out of the operation room and into intensive care than Portugal returned to casualty.”

Reeling from the setback delivered by the nation’s constitutional court on top of blistering criticism from opposition politicians and a wide cross-section of citizens, the Portuguese government is now studying plan B.

Widely praised in Brussels for sticking to the stringent terms of the €78 billion bailout negotiated with international creditors two years ago, confidence suddenly nose-dived when Portugal’s highest court ruled that some of the key austerity measures included in the 2013 budget were not acceptable.

The court rejected pay cuts for government workers and pensioners, thus confronting the government with finding an alternative way of making savings of €1.3 billion this year. It also cast doubts on how much further austerity will be tolerated, not only by angry citizens but by the nation’s top judges.

The European Commission welcomed Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho’s promise that his government remained committed to the adjustment programme, including its fiscal targets and timeline.

The proposed alternative deficit reduction measures are deeper cuts in public service, especially social security, education, health services and state-run companies. They are expected to be presented at the end of this month, or early next, and will almost certainly bring yet more job losses, hardship and anger.

The Fitch credit rating agency wondered if the ruling of the constitutional court “could be interpreted as saying that all public spending cuts that affect civil servants are unconstitutional.” It added: “If that interpretation is correct, the ruling represents a setback to future fiscal adjustment efforts in Portugal.”

The wider fear is that politicians in the other struggling euro economies may face complications if their own judges examine the constitutional correctness of austerity measures.

Troika representatives will soon be back in Lisbon to assess how Portugal is now going to cope. Meanwhile, eurozone finance ministers meeting in Dublin this weekend agreed "in principle" to give Portugal and Ireland seven more years to repay their loans. Portugal hopes this will facilitate a return to full market financing. But the Commission says the extension is dependent on the government providing compelling evidence that it has found an alternative solution to the €1.3 billion shortfall.

Regaining full market access may not happen this year.  “In our opinion, at best, this may occur in 2014,” declared a Barclays report. “Negative growth, rising unemployment, and delayed fiscal targets could even push Portugal to require additional official funding in 2014.”

As a backdrop to all this, the United States Treasury secretary Joseph “Jack” Lew,  on his first official visit to Europe, suggested to EU Commission president José Manuel Barroso among others that austerity should be relaxed in favour of more focus on policies that drive economic growth.

Many in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe have been saying this for years, arguing that austerity measures depress growth and are counterproductive.

While the debate rages on, Portugal may soon emerge from the casualty ward, but it will still need intensive care.

Conman Ken proves crime does pay!

The Welsh fugitive conman Kenner Elias Jones, a Walter Mitty character who disappeared two years ago after being tracked down in Portugal, has showed up in Spain, still leading an extraordinary life of fantasy and fraud.

Best known as Ken Jones, he has defrauded charities, religious institutions and hospitals, as well as many companies and individuals, in a criminal career spanning 40 years and involving more than 60 convictions.

In recent months he has been up to his old tricks in the Murcia region of

southeastern Spain. The Guardia Civil in Cartagena say they are aware of Jones staying in local hotels and leaving without paying the bills, but like their counterparts previously in Portugal, they seem unable or unwilling to arrest him.

Jones, 62, ‘collapsed’ in a restaurant and was taken to a district hospital near San Javier where he stayed having tests for six weeks. On being discharged, apparently in good health, he promised to settle the bill of more €26,000 with medical insurance. He had pulled the same stunt in a Portuguese hospital.

Over the past couple of weeks and using the Christian name Elias rather than Kenner or Ken, Jones has been spotted relaxing in the Murcia seaside resort of Santiago de la Ribeira. It is thought he may now be in Valencia, either gadding about or relaxing in hospital.

Charged with stealing thousands of pounds from an employer in the UK, he absconded from Lewes Crown Court in Sussex before his trial 10 years ago. He has been on the run ever since.

Long before that, he had been sentenced in the Old Bailey in London to three years’ imprisonment for committing theft and forgery. Coventry Crown Court sentenced him to 15-months’ jail for obtaining money by deception. He received a further 18-month sentence for deception and fraud from the Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court in South Wales.

Originally from Caernarfon, Gwynedd in North Wales, his colourful career has also included imprisonment and deportation from both Canada and the United States where he was deemed by officials to be “a danger to society.” A senior immigration officer in the US described him as “the best conman I have ever encountered in my entire career.”

Between fleeing the UK in 2003 and turning up in Portugal in 2011, Jones, a.k.a. Kenneth Ngeiwo Hawkins, spent years in Kenya posing as a doctor and administered medicines to children athough he had no medical qualifications. He is still wanted in Kenya for alleged debts of more than US$100,000.

An estate agent in the town of Palmela, south of Lisbon, told me how in 2011 Jones approached him saying he wanted to buy a house in the €400,000 to €600,000 price range. The wily Welshman went on to diddle the agent out of hundreds of euros by saying his foreign credit card was incompatible with the Portuguese system and he needed money urgently for medicine and other vital expenses.

On the understanding that Jones was transferring money from an overseas bank account, a Palmela travel agent handed over tickets worth €2,500 for Jones’ wife and two adopted children to fly into Lisbon from Kenya. The travel agent reported the scam to the Polícia Judiciária but she never got her money.

The return trip to Kenya was paid for by the Cáritas charitable organisation in Sétubal, according to a reliable Palmela source.

After being exposed in Portugal by dogged investigators from the BBC Wales Week In Week Out TV programme, Jones disappeared again and has gone about his wicked ways unreported until now. He is still pretending to be a qualified doctor and an ordained Anglican priest. He tells people he is planning to rejoin his family in Kenya where in 2003 he set up a charity called Luke’s Foundation. Even for the highly imaginative Ken Jones, getting out of Europe may now prove to be difficult: his passport expired at the end of January this year.

Those who have met him say he is a very intelligent, easy-to-talk-to, plausible and likeable person who confesses to multiple lamentable health problems – but then those are normal characteristics in a successful conman.

A full, unexpunged account of his activities over the past 40 years in his own words would make a riveting book – but who would believe it?

* algarvenewswatch will welcome any further accurate, honest information from readers. Please post comments below or send information to lenport@gmail.com. Be assured that sources will remain strictly confidential if that is their wish. 

Ana Moura - in tune with the times

Amid all the depressing economic news emanating day after day in Portugal, even melancholic fado music can provide welcome light relief, especially when sung by Ana Moura. It is also giving solace of sorts to Portuguese emigrants who have sought a better life abroad.

There can be no greater compliment to a female fado singer than to be likened to the iconic Amália Rodrigues. Although bordering on the heretical to some older fado aficionados, this is the kind of reputation Ana Moura is garnering on her current tour of Europe and North America.

So far this month she has performed to full houses in San Francisco, Boston, New York, Washington and Cleveland. This weekend it’s Chicago and Minneapolis, then on to North Carolina and Ontario.

A correspondent for the Boston Globe described Moura as “one of the latest singers to come out of the Lisbon taverns, where fado’s essence resides, and become one of its global ambassadors. She embodies, at a high level, modern fado’s duality: her potent contralto and her traditional fado treatments have earned her Amália comparisons at home – the ultimate connoisseur’s praise.”

As a fado “ambassador,” Moura is rivalling Mozambique-born Mariza who in the past decade has reportedly sold a million records and played more than a thousand concerts worldwide.

Moura has been singing fado since the age of six. Her interpretations of the form of music unique to the Portuguese have moved on from the purely traditional songs she learned from her fado-singing parents in Santarém.

“I started to grow up and listen to all kinds of styles, and I always sang many styles, but I always felt as a fado singer. It’s a way to express your feelings, your soul,” says Moura, now 33.

Rather shy off-stage, she has resisted being ‘programmed’ as a performer and cherished individual freedom of expression. “We are authentic if we sing with our souls. It should come from inside. I want the spontaneity that my parents taught me when I was young,” she says.

It helps, but you don’t have to understand Portuguese to appreciate fado. “If you have the emotion, the message can be felt by the audience even if they don’t understand the lyrics,” she told the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. In her recently released album, Desfado, three of the 14 songs are in English. One is called “Thank You, and the lyrics include the lines “Thank you for making me cry” and “Thank you for breaking my heart.”

Said a music critic in the New York Daily News, “The point, it seems, is to savour emotion itself, to celebrate the frisson of feeling beyond consequence. It takes a singer of rare passion to articulate the nuances of such risks and, right now, the Lisbon-based Moura stands at the forefront of them.”

Her innovative fado renditions sometimes incorporate elements of modern popular music. Some of her melodies are even downright jaunty, but much of what she sings is still plaintive. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones put his finger on it by describing fado as “Portuguese blues.”

On meeting her for the first time, Richards also succinctly summed up another of Moura’s attributes: “She’s very, very pretty.”

The mutual admiration between the Rolling Stones and the beguilingly demure Miss Moura was (and still is) obvious from YouTube videos of them rehearsing and performing together in Lisbon back in 2007 (click on link below).

Today in Portugal, Moura's 'blues' could not be more in tune with this time of deep pessimism over debt, austerity, unemployment and the future for the nation’s youth.

While her current concert tour is attracting admirers of various nationalities, many in her audiences are Portuguese emigrants. Over the past two years, since the country entered its worst recession in decades, some 240,000 people have left to join the millions of other Portuguese already living abroad. Moura’s music nicely satisfies feelings of homesickness, nostalgia, fate - saudades.

* Ana Moura is performing in the Barbican Centre in London on 20th April. 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kjoV2GUFvg

Criminals, wanted and unwanted

The law often works excruciatingly slowly and in dark, convoluted ways. Overshadowed internationally by the latest episode in the 12-year-old legal saga being enacted in Britain over the radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada, there is lingering concern in Portugal about gangster Abu Salem who is facing trial for alleged heinous crimes committed in India two decades ago.

Born into a modest family in the north of India in 1968, Abu Salem rose rapidly from taxi driver and petty crook to billionaire underworld don. He is accused of involvement in extortion, murder and playing an active role in the 1993 Mumbai bomb atrocities that killed more than 250 people and injured 700.

Portuguese police arrested Salem in Lisbon in 2002 along with his Bollywood actress girlfriend Monica Bedi. She went on to serve two years in a Portuguese jail for her association with Salem and possessing forged travel documents.

In February 2004 a Portuguese court approved Salem’s extradition to face charges in India. He was eventually deported in November 2005. The deportation was dependent on Indian government assurances that Salem would not face the death penalty or be kept behind bars for more than 25 years.

Portugal was one of the first countries in the world to abolish capital punishment. It imposed an absolute ban long before joining the prohibition under the European Convention on Human Rights in 1976.

While Salem awaited trial, police in New Delhi and Mumbai came up with further charges carrying the death penalty. A court in Portugal responded in September 2011 by cancelling the earlier deportation ruling. Then last July, with Salem still incarcerated in a high-security Indian prison, the Portuguese Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s cancellation.

Last week while on a visit to India with a business delegation to discuss bilateral economic, trade and social security arrangements, the Portuguese foreign minister raised the matter of Salem’s extradition with his Indian counterpart.

“I think the judiciary in Portugal has raised some issues. The judiciary here in our country will take care of them,” External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said in a joint press conference with Paulo de Sacadura Cabral Portas. 

Mr Khurshid conveyed India's “deep appreciation for the positive support” extended by Portugal on the extradition. He said India would “remain compliant with the expectations,” of the Portuguese legal system and judiciary, an assurance of sorts that Cabral Portas found “reasonable.”

Efforts in Britain to deport Abu Qatada to Jordan to face terrorism charges have been going on now for seven years at a cost to the British taxpayer of half a million pounds in legal aid alone. Despite assurances from Jordan, it is argued that confessions obtained by torture would be used against Qatada. While his continued presence infuriates the British government, Justice Minister Lord McNally said this week that the legal protection holding up the deportation request was “part of what makes us a civilised society.”

In marked contrast to all this ponderous deliberation, the attempt by law enforcers in the United States to extradite the former Black Panther, convicted murderer, prison escapee and hijacker George Wright was dealt with in Portugal remarkably swiftly.

Arrested near Lisbon in September 2011 after 41 years on the run, the FBI wanted Wright back in America to serve the rest of his 1972 New Jersey jail sentence. By the time they tracked him down, however, he had morphed into José Luís Jorge dos Santos, 67, a Portuguese citizen married to a Portuguese woman by whom he had fathered two sons in a country with a statute of limitations, even for murderers.

In less than two months, a panel of three judges ruled that the statute of limitations had expired and so Mr Wright a.k.a. Sr Santos could not be extradited. A month later the decision was upheld by Portugal’s Supreme Court and the case formally closed. Wright was suddenly a free man for the first time in 50 years.

Meanwhile, there has been much criticism of endemic inefficiency in the execution of justice in Portugal, so much so that judicial reform was one of the key demands in the €74 million bailout deal.  Also, a recent study indicated that the Portuguese are among the citizens of Europe with the least confidence in their country’s legal system.

Flawed as it is, though, some might argue that in some ways, highlighted by the cases of Abu Salem and George Wright, the legal system here is part of what makes this a civilised society.