«"There's pressure that we don't understand. The government says it's [pressure] from the European Commission because of the PRR, but the truth is that there are issues that European Commission, such as own acts. It goes beyond that, because the Commission, the OECD and the various organisations have been putting pressure on governments only in the sense of greater liberalisation of entry [into the profession]", the president of the Portuguese Association of Law Firms (ASAP) told Jornal Económico (JE).
José Luís Moreira da Silva believes that this morning's plenary session, on 5 January, will not bring any surprises and says that "the government is going far beyond the European Commission", since Brussels' warnings do not cover changes to paid internships, without guarantees that the firms will be able to pay, and to own acts.
"It's not so much the individual measures taken, but all of them together. In other words, if we mix up multidisciplinary firms, the brutal restriction on lawyers' own activities, the creation of the supervisory body with a majority of non-lawyers in the Bar Association.... It means completely changing the rules of the legal profession in Portugal."
argues the president of ASAP and partner at SRS Legal to JE.
[...]
"There will have 800 million [frozen], but they don't say for sure because of what. I can put forward several alternative hypotheses, such as the miserable degree of execution of the PRR. Perhaps if the government had managed to execution, the instalment would have come in full..." conjectures José Luís Moreira da Silva.»