One of the Algarve’s anti-oil groups, MALP, has published the content of a letter received from the Prime Minister, António Costa, in response to the demands that the Minister for the Environment and the President of the Portuguese Environment Agency both should resign.

The suggestion that employment should be sought elsewhere for these two pro-oil protagonists came after the Galp-ENI Aljezur test well was allowed to circumvent the neccessitity of providing an Environmental Impact Assessment.

Portugal’s Left Bloc parliamentary party has filed an official complaint against the Irish airline, Ryanair, whose management has refused to send a Director to answer MPs’ questions.

The president of the Left Bloc’s parliamentary group, Pedro Filipe Soares, said, "It is a protest about the way Ryanair treated the house of democracy in Portugal."

The closure of Media Capital’s @iol.pt email service is scheduled for November this year as the company decides to focus on its content provision and shut down peripheral services.

After 18 years, the official date for emails ending in @iol.pt is November 30th.

Average occupancy per room in Algarve hotels hit 95% in August, 0.5% higher than August last year.

The hoteliers’ association of the Algarve, AHETA, added that income had risen 1%.

A schoolgirl from the Roma community based in the Alentejo has been told by a court that she doesn’t have to go to school anymore.

The fifteen-year-old had pretty much stopped going to school, claiming she was helping her sick mother with domestic tasks. A case was brought under the Protection of Minors legislation concerning the seventh year pupil at a school in Avis, in the Upper Alentejo.

Depressed, angry and at their wits’ end, the high-profile British couple given permission to create a home on the Ria Formosa island of Armona - and then told it was illegal and would have to be bulldozed - took their fight to Minister, Pedro Matos Fernandes yesterday by mounting a protest in front of the Environment Ministry.

For two hours, James Tod and Paul Roseby handed out leaflets to incoming Ministry staff complaining that they are caught in the middle of a legal wrangle that has nothing to do with them and, the way things are going, will not be resolved in their lifetime.

Multi-millionaire football team manager, José Mourinho, has been fined €2m and handed an agreed one-year suspended prison sentence in order to end the Spanish tax evasion case against him.

The manager of Manchester United had been charged with two tax frauds, dating back to when he was at Real Madrid, which denied Spain’s treasury €3.3m in 2011 and 2012.

Warning bells have been ringing in estate agencies across Portugal due to the Left Bloc’s insistence that the 2019 State Budget should include the scrapping of the Non-Habitual Resident scheme that has attracted thousands of foreign buyers of property.

Finland already has torn up its tax treaty with Portugal, with Sweden making firm steps to do the same.