Such is the efficiency of the Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF) that 7,000 Golden Visas are waiting to be processed.
An estimated €3.5 billion in real estate sales are held up by bureaucracy, a testament to Portugal’s failure to run a scheme with knock-on benefits to the economy and rich pickings for top-end estate agencies.
Lagos council has done a similar deal as Olhão with Docapesca and soon will have financial and managerial control of its own waterfront.
The Avenida Descrobrimentos along Lagos’ prime water frontage will now be managed by the council which now is in charge of licensing the commercial areas, setting the fees which will he ‘harmonised’, and collecting the rents.
The new ‘cheap fuel’ law, introduced in April this year amid groans of pain from fuel retailers, dictated that all fuel stations over a certain size must offer low cost diesel and petrol, made cheap by the exclusion of additives.
The savings settled down to between two and three cents a litre with the fuel companies claiming that drivers’ fuel economy would be lower and engine life reduced if they opt for the low cost option.
Portugal’s Constitutional Court has declared as 'unconstitutional' the test scheme that has seen many teachers sacked from their posts, thus exacerbating teacher shortages.
In what may be the final humiliation for Education Minister Nuno Crato, teachers’ unions already are calling for hefty compensation for those of their members that were dismissed after they failed to pass the dreaded test.
A major rescue operation is underway as seven tugs assemble to tow a tanker which was stranded near Cascais Marina on Saturday night.
The Captain of the Port of Cascais, Mário Fonte Domingues, said that the Tokyo Spirit's ballast tanks were pumped out this morning and after this stabilisation operation the tugs can get to work pulling the ship back into deeper water.
The Left Bloc’s Catarina Martins has started to link Portugal's left-of-centre parties together and said today “there are possibilities of convergence between the Socialist Party, the Left Bloc and the Communist Party of Portugal."
"Negotiations are well underway," said Martins, after meeting with the Communist Party leaders today, adding that "Portugal is able to have a different government" and that "Passos Coelho and Paulo Portas will not form a government."
A group of MEPs has called on the European Commission, the European Banking Authority, the European Central Bank and the International Financial Action Task Force to investigate Isabel dos Santos’ investments in Portugal.
The Parliamentary Intergroup for Integrity and Transparency demanded an investigation into the purchase of Efacec and other investments in Portugal by the Angolan businesswoman whose business holdings widely are believed to have been funded by oil revenues and commissions paid to Angola's treasury but diverted by the president to further his daughter's business career.
The whole of Portugal has been placed on yellow alert today due to a forecast of heavy rain accompanied by thunderstorms and strong winds gusting to 80 km/h along the coast, and 100 km/h inland.
In the Algarve the warning includes high seas with southeasterly waves of 2 to 3 metres along the south coast.
