The Mayor of Maya today confirmed that there is “no recourse” for FC Porto to withdraw the purchase of land for the club’s new academy, ensuring that the project for that area will not be affected.
In a meeting with journalists, Antonio Silva Thiago confirmed that the amount of 680 thousand euros that the Porto club SAD paid in February as a deposit to purchase 14 plots of land at a public auction in that municipality in the Porto region, for a total of 3.4 million euros, “remains for the municipality.”
The previous management of FC Porto, led by Pinto da Costa, presented a project for a new academy in Maya, where the Olival activity will be moved, in Vila Nova de Gaia, with playing fields, housing for athletes and a small stadium, among others. Things, having acquired land for the purpose and paid the first deposit, but failed to pay the second deposit.
He added: “We received the first indication at the time of the award of 680,000 euros, and after that there was a deadline to deliver a reinforcement of 510,000. At that time the previous honesty handed over the check, the check was not valid, we waited a while, then there were elections for the sadd [do FC Porto] We waited a few days. The mayor explained: “We were told, with the new administration, that they would work to create conditions for granting the check, and we waited, and the bank waited, but that did not happen.”
He continued: “I had a conversation with the new president of SAD [André Villas Boas] I knew I would create these conditions, but it didn’t happen. “I have been told that SAD will not be able to move forward with the project now and we understand that.”
On Monday, FC Porto’s company, SAD, announced in a statement that it had given up on building the academy in Maya because “the club will not have the financial means at this stage to continue the process towards acquiring the land in question.”
In response to a question about the destination of the amount already paid, Silva Thiago said that “there is nothing that can be returned.”
He explained, “When the deal fails, we keep the deposit and keep the land. This is what the terms say, and we cannot invalidate what we put in the terms of the public auction.”
Regarding the deal not being completed, the mayor admitted that he was “a little sad.”
“I can’t say that I will go to San Joao twice as happy,” he said.
However, the mayor stressed that “the project for that area is not at home” with FC Porto withdrawing from the project.
“There, we approved a 357-hectare project for the largest urban park in the country, the project exists and goes beyond what the academy used to be,” the mayor stated. The FC Porto academy will be located in the North Sports Park, which still exists, and I remember that there is also a sports park dedicated to Boavista. To have her academy there too.
Silva Thiago (PSD/CDS-PP) also took the opportunity to stress that the entire operation was “completely done legally.”
“Maya Chamber has fully complied with the law. He considered that the news that came out was all a lie, a complete lie created by an incompetent and ignorant person who did not know how to read the law and who lied and took value from the municipality and defamed the reputation of council employees.
At the end of May, the Socialist Party-elected advisor to the Executive Director of the Maya Chamber, Francisco Vieira de Carvalho, told Público that the auction to sell those lands to FC Porto was “the fastest public auction ever.” .
The advisor accused Silva Thiago’s CEO of not waiting for the Municipal Council’s approval of the deal to officially communicate the approval of that public auction, allowing the deal to be published in Diário da República after a few hours of deliberations.
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