The President and Chief Executive Officer of the Jerónimo Martins Group, Pedro Soares dos Santos, indicates, in an interview with Jornal de Negócios/Antena 1, that there is a “great challenge” for the entire value chain to “try to prevent the rise in prices” from “strongly affect Portuguese families” and urges the Government to lower VAT on essential goods, similarly to the Polish government.

“There is a big challenge for farmers, for producers, for the Government and for us [about] how we are going to try to prevent the price escalation from hitting Portuguese families hard”, says the CEO of Jerónimo Martins. In this context, Soares dos Santos says that the Government “has to do this work”, in order to reduce the impact of rising prices for consumers, defending that “it must be an option to cut VAT” on essential goods.

However, the president of the owner of Pingo Doce and Recheio recognizes that Poland did it quickly “because it had the financial capacity to do so”. “I don't know if our country has it”, he concludes. It is recalled that when presenting the results for the full year of 2021, Soares dos Santos had already argued that one of the priorities of the new Government should be to provide “strong fiscal relief to support Portuguese families in these uncertain times of increased income, costs and inflation”.