"Being in the government is not part of my ambitions and it is not part of my DNA", said in an interview to Lusa the then executive president (CEO) of Partex, a position that, however, left, after the dissolution of the company, and that since May 2020 led the preparation of the Portuguese Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR).
The manager was born on 23 November 1952 in Catabola, on the central plateau of Bié, to a family already rooted in Angola. In the same interview, he recounted an episode of his life in the country that conditioned him "forever": he was arrested and put before a firing squad.
"My life after that is a kind of bonus, I could practically have stayed there, there are things that condition us forever," said the mining engineer, who at the time of arrest was a 25-year-old university student in Luanda.
Costa Silva, who claims to be "clearly a man who comes from the left", was imprisoned between 1977 and 1980 in São Paulo prison, in the capital.
It was during this period that he was even placed "in front of a firing squad", he heard the sound of guns, but they did not fire: "I never knew why", he said.
His political activity as leader of the associative movement began before the 25th of April, against the colonial regime, and continued after Angola's independence: "We were young and we wanted to change the world", he recalled.
"I was the leader of the associative movement in the city of Luanda, we created the so-called 'Amílcar Cabral Committees' and we had great political battles, almost to the point of rupture and collision with the regime itself", he said.
It is as a result of this activity that he was arrested in December 1977, where he was "barbarically beaten and tortured almost every other day, in the first year of imprisonment", he recalled.
He graduated in mining engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, then added a master's degree in petroleum engineering at Imperial College, London, and a doctorate in petroleum reservoirs, also in London and Lisbon. He has three kids.
He started working at Sonangol, then at Companhia Portuguesa de Serviços (CPS), was executive director at the French multinational Compagnie Generale de Geophysique (CGG), where he coordinated oil exploration projects in Bahrain, Mexico and Russia and, later, in French Petroleum Institute in Paris, where he handled some of the biggest gas fields in the world (Algeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran).
In 2003, he assumed the presidency of the Executive Committee of the Partex group, a Gulbenkian oil company, which in 2019 was sold to the Thai public company PTT Exploration and Production. On September 1, 2021, he announced the termination of his duties, after the sole shareholder had proceeded with the dissolution and liquidation of the oil company.
On 31 May 2020, Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa invited António Costa Silva to coordinate the preparation of the Economic Recovery Program and on 16 April 2021, appointed him to chair the National Commission for Monitoring the Recovery and Resilience Plan. (PRR).
He now assumes the Ministry of Economy and the Sea, in an enlarged ministry, with three secretaries of State: Economy; Tourism, Commerce and Services and Sea.
