Corruption in Poortugal
Whereas Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index has shown that Portugal ranks favourably compared to other countries, corruption in Portugal remains an existent threat.
Allegations of public sector bribery and high-profile corruption scandals involving senior civil servants and public office holders subsist. For example, Prime Minister António Costa had to step down in 2023 following corruption investigations tying him to concessions for lithium mining in Northern Portugal. In light of these examples, the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) implored Portugal to bolster its effectiveness in upholding integrity and averting corruption involving its law enforcement agencies and the central government. In 2022, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) also called on Portugal to promptly enhance its foreign bribery enforcement. These parameters have informed the low level of trust in the democratic bodies and institutions and the recurring corruption cases involving influential business personalities, administrators, and politicians show that safeguards against corruption are significantly ineffective and inefficient.
However, the government has also implemented some measures and legislative and policy avenues such as: Simplified Administrative Procedures (the SIMPLEX Programme); a National Ant-Corruption Strategy (which, in 2024, appears to remain inhibited); scant protection for corruption whistleblowers; a so-called “Anti-Corruption Campaign” by “Portuguese Association of Business Ethics” (presumably, by some superstitious idea of ‘ethics’); as well as private sector engagements. Despite these measures, there remains a myriad of issues that hinder the fight against corruption.
For instance, political interference occasionally leads to obstruction of corruption investigations, selective enforcement of corruption laws, limited accountability, and undermining of independent institutions. Associação Sindical dos Juízes Portugueses v Tribunal de Contas case of 2017 demonstrated that had it not been for the intervention of Court of Justice of European Union, Portuguese legislatures would have successfully undermined the independence of the judiciary by reducing the salaries of judges, weakening an important link in fighting corruption. To this end, one of the reforms Portugal must undertake is to enact sufficient safeguards against political interference with independent offices involved in the fight against corruption.
As per the OCED report, Portugal must reform its foreign bribery enforcement to meet the threshold set in the OCED Anti-Bribery Convention. This is prompted by the fact that Portugal has never made any foreign bribery convictions since the Convention entered into force (in 1999). Portugal lags in proactive detection and investigation of foreign bribery cases, and most cases are prematurely closed. To this end, Portugal requires to address concerns of the Working Group related to foreign bribery on legal and natural persons effectively and proportionately.
While Portugal has a whistleblower protection framework, it is necessary to ensure that tortuous claims such as slander, libel, and defamation are not used as defences by the accused persons to silence journalists and corruption whistleblowers. In this respect, Portugal needs to enact a higher standard for defamation, libel, and slander when raised as defences in cases involving suspected corruption.