TAP's Chief Executive Has Run the Airline for Twenty Months Without a Renewed Mandate, on a Pay Cut Nobody Restored

Luís Rodrigues's mandate as chief executive of TAP ran out at the end of 2024. Twenty months later he is still in the job, in what the government calls "full functions", and it has never renewed or reappointed him. Asked why, neither the state nor the airline will say.

The only explanation offered is procedural. "Under the applicable legislation, once the mandate ends without a new appointment or reappointment, the directors remain in office until new holders are designated, guaranteeing the validity of management acts," the government said. That is an accurate description of Portuguese company law. It is not a reason.

The pay cut that was made permanent

The oddity that follows is financial. When Rodrigues joined the executive committee in 2023, he took over his predecessor's salary, which already carried a 30 percent reduction imposed by TAP's remuneration committee on 11 August 2021. For everyone else on the board that cut was temporary and tied to the restructuring plan, extended to 30 June 2026 by agreement between the Portuguese state and the European Commission's competition directorate. When that date passed, their pay was restored.

His was not. TAP's own reporting uses different language for his case: the remuneration of the director Luís Manuel da Silva Rodrigues "corresponds to a permanent cut, unrelated to the period of execution of the restructuring plan". He earned 504,000 euros last year, with no variable component, because neither the remuneration committee nor the state shareholder that replaced it after the committee was wound up in October 2023 ever decided on one. Inside the airline, that unresolved bonus question is cited as what has kept the mandate hanging.

Everything else around him has moved

Rodrigues is the constant in a board that has been steadily rebuilt. He arrived holding both the chairman and chief executive roles; in July 2025 the new government appointed Carlos Oliveira as chairman and took the dual mandate away. The chief financial officer, Gonçalo Pires, left in February and was replaced by Renato Inácio. Mário Chaves, the operations director and a manager the pilots' union had praised, departed in August, with José Eduardo Moreira moving up. Both replacements were co-opted onto the board and later ratified by the state. Each of those moves required a decision. The chief executive's mandate did not get one.

The government's side of the story points at the sale. In April 2025, on the eve of a general election, the office of the Minister for Infrastructure and Housing, Miguel Pinto Luz, said it would not appoint public managers before that government's term ended, deferring TAP's board into the next legislature. The privatisation then swallowed the calendar. Since the Council of Ministers triggered the third stage of the sale, Parpública has delivered its analysis of the binding bids from Air France-KLM and Lufthansa, and the government must now choose a winner, negotiate with one or both, or end the process with none. A new shareholder will want its own chief executive.

That logic has a cost. The airline is not in a quiet patch: its half-year loss widened 40 percent to 99.2 million euros, the Prime Minister has staked a 3.2 billion euro recovery on the sale, and the maintenance arm is bidding for European rearmament work. All of it is being run by a chief executive whose formal authority expired in 2024.

What This Means for Expats

• Nothing changes on your booking. Acts taken by directors serving past their mandate are valid in law, so schedules, tickets and compensation claims are unaffected.
• Read it as a signal on the sale. A government that expected to keep this chief executive for a full new term would have said so. Leaving the seat formally vacant keeps it available to whoever buys the airline.
• Expect leadership change after the decision, not before. If you are a supplier or frequent flyer watching for a new strategy, the trigger is the privatisation decision.
• It is a pattern worth noticing. Portuguese state companies routinely run on expired mandates. It is legal, and it is also how accountability thins out.

The government will have to appoint someone eventually, whether that is Rodrigues confirmed at last or a nominee of the buyer. Until it does, Portugal's flag carrier is being steered by a chief executive the state has neither reappointed nor replaced, on a salary it cut permanently and never explained.