Cork industry magnate and serial investor Américo Amorim (pictured) again takes the top place in the ranking of Portugal’s rich.
Amorim’s assets are valued at €3.3 billion but the octogenarian businessman who chairs the Amorim Group and also is the main shareholder of Galp saw his fortune reduce by over €1 billion in the year due to problems at Banco Popular in Spain and negative results from banks in Mozambique and Brazil.
Never before has a Portuguese company lost so much value on the stock exchange in one day.
BES shares today opened in Lisbon and collapsed in value by 45% in reaction to yesterday’s announcement that the country’s third largest bank had managed to lose €3.577 billion in six months.
Germany and Denmark have done the best from their membership of a wider Europe, leaving Portugal languishing at the bottom of the pile of member countries.
Portugal’s per capita increase in income attributable to European integration has been just €20 a year, way behind Denmark’s €500 and Germany’s €450.
Prime Minister Passos Coelho and Portugal’s President Cavaco Silva soon will be on holiday, not together but at the same time, as they both enjoy Algarve breaks.
Enter the redoubtable João Vasconcelos (pictured) from the Committee of Users of the Via do Infante (CUVI) who has sanctioned new protests outside the holiday homes of the perpetrators of the tolls system and will be demanding some answers on the whole question of the Algarve’s pernicious motorway tolls.
Unemployment across the eurozone fell ever so slightly in June, dropping to 11.5% in June down from 11.6% in May.
Despite the welcome drop, nearly 18.5 million people in the euro area are struggling without jobs.
Eurozone inflation dropped in July to its lowest level since the depths of the financial crisis, dipping further into the “danger zone”.
Prices rose in the single currency area by 0.4% in July, from 0.5% in June.
The number of British expats who required help with emergency passports jumped more than 8% last year.
A total of 31,134 people asked the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for help over the course of 2013/14, compared with 28,783 the previous year.
The results are out, and they are at the far end of the city’s worst expectations. In the first six months of the year Banco Espírito Santo, run until recently by Ricardo Salgado, has managed to accumulate eye-watering losses.
The bank’s trading statement reported that this loss was due to ‘extraordinary factors.’
