Francisco Xavier Pacheco, popularly known as Mickky, is likely to be made the working President of the Goa Congress, sources said on Friday.

Mickky was in Delhi and formally joined the Congress and is tipped to be appointed, sources said.

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The meeting with Rahul Gandhi is to take place next week as the party thinks that Mickky is popular in the state and resources are at his hands.

Mickky speaking on the phone from Goa did not reveal that he has been given any commitment from the party, but said, “I want to settle the people in the Congress who have been with me for a long time and so I will meet the Congress leaders in Delhi soon.”

Sources said that Mickky has met Kamal Nath who has been instrumental in his joining the Congress and also met P. Chidambaram, Dinesh Gundu Rao, and K.C. Venugopal in Delhi. He has been asked to come back after a week to meet Rahul Gandhi.

Mickky has been Minister of Rural Development, Archeology, and Archives, Tourism, Captain of Ports, Housing, Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, and held several other portfolios. He won the first Assembly election as a member of the United Goans Democratic Party in 2002, later formed the United Goans Democratic Party (Secular), and merged that with the Bharatiya Janata Party in January 2005.

He later joined the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and won the 2007 election. Prior to the 2012 Legislative Assembly election, he left the NCP and joined the Goa Vikas Party (GVP), and in 2012 he quit the GVP and joined the Goa Su-raj Party.

While the Congress central leadership feels that he is influential, many state leaders think otherwise and in anonymity say that he is capable of winning only his own seat and is not influential in the whole state. They also point to the controversies around him.

The Congress in Goa has three former Chief Ministers — Fransisco Sardinha, Luizinho Faleiro and Digambar Kamat. Girish Chodankar in the state is the President of the party who is considered close to Rahul Gandhi. The state goes to poll early next year.

Former Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram was appointed the party’s senior observer to bolster the opposition party’s preparations for the 2022 state Assembly polls.

Chidambaram was in the state and had met the party leaders and official functionaries across ranks during his first visit after his appointment.