The failure of the inducement by Finanças in rebating a small percentage of VAT paid by consumers buying meals, accommodation, haircuts and car repairs has now been laid bare.

Last year just 6.6% of the 614.3 million invoices in the sectors covered by the scheme were issued with tax identification numbers added, the tax department therefore seems right to change the scheme for 2014 by adding the lottery incentive. As before, 15% of the VAT rate of purchases at restaurants, car garages and hair salons can go towards reducing a taxpayer's income tax if the receipt is registered online.

The natioon soon will have a lottery style car give away, but will the overall registration of receipts increase or are consumers on the side of the retailer and against the government’s increasing incursion into the nation’s business activities?

Inflation in the eurozone dropped to 0.8% in December, down from 0.9% in November.

The flash estimate from Eurostat was too early to provide a breakdown by country.

EasyJet announced that it transported more than 61.3 million passengers in 2013, an increase of 3.6% over the previous year.

Much of the increase in traffic came in December when 4.5 million people flew with the carrier.

Cartons of cocaine have been delivered to an Aldi supermarket in Germany.

Boxes of bananas also containing 140kg of the drug were sent to five different Aldi shops in the Berlin area in what police say was a “logistical error” made by smugglers.

All of Portugal's opposition parties have criticised the final report into the expensive 'swaps' fiasco, accusing the author, the social democrat Clara Marques Mendes, or producing a whitewash to protect the current finance minister Maria Luís Albuquerque, (pictured)
 
Eight months, 42 hearings, thousands of documents analysed and three secretaries of state later the government approved the report of the investigation into the swaps scandal which concluded that yes, there was imprudent management of public money, but it blames only the José Sócrates government, the banks that sold the deals and the directors of the public companies that signed the contracts.

Fifteen of Portugal's ports are closed to shipping due to strong seas, according to information on the Portuguese Navy’s website whichreports that in the Algarve - Lagos, Alvor and Portimão are now closed to all navigation.

Decreasing bad weather has led the Portuguese Institute of Ocean and Atmosphere to post an orange warning along the west coats and also the Faro region as the strong waves will gradually decrease from this afternoon. "The situation should normalise on Wednesday," according to meteorologist Maria João Frada from the Institute.

A parliamentary group from the Portuguese Communist Party has questioned the government about "the impact of successive budget cuts" on the Algarve’s public hospitals.

A delegation visited Portimão Hospital, one of the hospitals which along with Faro and Lagos units make up the Centro Hospitalar do Algarve (CHA) and has produced a series of questions in a damning report.

Spain stepped up its use of wind farms and hydroelectric plants in 2013, leading to a remarkable drop of 23% in greenhouse gas emissions from the country’s power sector.

For the first time ever, wind power was a leading source of electricity for the country last year.