Business 8 August 2026

Portugal's competition authority clears Fnac's owner to take over 11 Staples stores

The AdC issued a non-opposition decision on the deal notified in May by Darty Portugal, finding it unlikely to create significant obstacles to effective competition in the national market.

The deal had been sitting on the table since June, waiting for a stamp. It arrived on Friday: the Autoridade da Concorrência will not oppose Darty Portugal taking exclusive control of 11 stores operated by Staples Portugal.

The regulator concluded that the notified concentration is not likely to create significant obstacles to effective competition in the national market — the formula the AdC uses when it lets a transaction through without attaching conditions. The notification was filed on 20 May, which puts the review at roughly two and a half months. The case sits in the AdC’s public register of concentration operations, where decisions are published one by one.

Where the 11 stores are

The spread is wider than you might guess. There are shops in Lisbon, Cascais, Setúbal and Santarém, plus Torres Vedras and Caldas da Rainha, then a northern cluster in Barcelos, Penafiel, Viana do Castelo and Vila do Conde, and one in Lagoa in the Algarve. This is not a metropolitan tidy-up. It is a national footprint.

What changes for anyone actually walking into one of them has not been spelled out publicly. Staples Portugal sells mostly school and office supplies, furniture and some electronics; Fnac plays a different game, built around technology, books, culture, membership cards and in-store events. The two ranges overlap in places, not everywhere.

The timing is not accidental either. The decision lands a few weeks before the school year starts, the absolute peak for stationery and school supplies, when these stores do a disproportionate share of their annual business. Whether the change of ownership is felt this September or only later is the question nobody has answered yet.

For Portuguese retail it is another marker in a summer of corporate manoeuvring — the same week that easyJet drew a £5.7bn takeover offer also closed this one, far smaller and far closer to home.

By Beatriz Mota

Photo: fvanrenterghem / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Cars stacked in a scrapyard awaiting shredding, with fluid collection drums in the foreground

Business 13 August 2026

The EU's new car-scrapping rules start today. The parts that reach your driveway come later

Regulation (EU) 2026/1738 entered into force on 13 August. It requires 15% recycled plastic in new cars from 2032, extends the framework to lorries, buses and motorcycles, and from mid-2031 lets only roadworthy vehicles be exported out of the EU.

The regulation that decides how cars are designed, dismantled and recycled at the end of their lives came into force across the European Union today. It replaces two directives old enough to vote: one from 2000, the other from 2005. None of this will be visible in a showroom tomorrow. Almost every figure in the text is dated to the next decade, and that is where the story sits. From today, manufacturers have to publish clear instructions for removing and…

Business 11 August 2026

Novobanco made €367.2m in six months, 15.6% less than a year ago

The drop comes from one-off costs tied to the sale to Groupe BPCE and a higher effective tax rate. Lending grew 5.9%, deposits 7.7%, and the CET1 ratio climbed to 19.2%.

Novobanco closed the first half of the year with a profit of €367.2 million. The same six months last year produced €434.9 million, which makes for a 15.6% fall. The bank's explanation rests on two things, neither of them commercial. The first is the one-off cost of the sale to Groupe BPCE, the French deal that formally got moving this half and completed on 30 April. The second is a higher effective tax rate, with the tax bill up by close to 38%. Add…

Business 11 August 2026

Norway's oil fund just bought eight Spanish shopping centres. Sonae Sierra gets to run them

Norges Bank Investment Management takes 92% of a portfolio valued at around €1.5bn. Sonae Sierra puts in 8% and takes on asset management of the 258,000 square metres.

The world's largest sovereign wealth fund is adding eight Spanish shopping centres to its books, and the company running them day to day will be Portuguese. Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway's oil fund, signed the agreement on 31 July to acquire a 92% interest and will pay around €1.4bn for it. The portfolio's gross value is roughly €1.5bn. A Sonae Sierra subsidiary takes the remaining 8% and will perform asset management on behalf…

Business 11 August 2026

Portuguese industry sold 6.5% more in June. Its payroll shrank

Turnover rose 6.5% year on year, driven by the domestic market (up 9.0%) and energy (up 11.6%). In the same month industrial employment fell 0.7% while wages paid rose 5.6%.

Portuguese factories took more money in June. The industry turnover index rose 6.5% on the same month last year, according to the series INE publishes for industrial business indices, and across the whole second quarter sales were up 7.5%, against a mere 1.4% in the previous quarter. The small print matters here. A good chunk of that rise is price rather than volume — the statistics office itself attributes the quarterly acceleration largely to prices.…

Business 10 August 2026

Five Braga charities are up to 95% through their builds and could still lose the EU money

UDIPSS Braga has written to the President and the Government about €11.9 million of social investment, €6.1 million of it from the recovery plan, at risk because deadlines expire before the works finish.

The question sounds absurd until you look at the paperwork. There are building sites in Braga that are 95% complete and may lose the European money that has paid for them so far, because the spending deadline runs out before the builders do. UDIPSS Braga, the district union of private social solidarity institutions, has sent an open letter to the President, the Prime Minister and several government ministers asking for an urgent political answer. Its…

Business 10 August 2026

Only two bidders are left in the race to sell CP its 300 km/h trains

France's Alstom and Spain's Talgo were the only companies to clear pre-qualification in CP's tender for 12 high-speed trains. They now have 90 days to file firm proposals, with a decision due late this year.

Two are left. Alstom of France and Talgo of Spain were the only companies to enter the pre-qualification stage of the tender CP launched in May to buy 12 high-speed trains, with submissions closing on 1 August. The timetable from here is set. Both have 90 days to turn a qualification into a firm proposal with prices and delivery dates, and a decision is expected before the end of the year. The tender carries a base value above €500 million and can reach…

Tugadaily chart with three bars: a 12-cent gross fall, a 2-cent cut in the ISP discount and a 10-cent real fall per litre of diesel on 10 August 2026

Business 9 August 2026

Fuel gets cheaper in Portugal on Monday (the state kept two cents of it)

Markets took about 12 cents a litre off diesel and 12.5 off petrol 95 for the week of 10 to 16 August. A two-cent cut in the ISP discount trims the real fall to 10 and 10.5.

If you put off filling the tank until Monday, you called it right. From 10 August fuel comes down across mainland Portugal, and on paper it is one of the biggest weekly falls of the summer: roughly 12 cents a litre off standard diesel and 12.5 cents off petrol 95, counting only what the international markets did. The pump display will tell a slightly different story. While the markets were easing, the government trimmed the discount on the fuel tax, the…

Business 8 August 2026

easyJet agrees to a £5.7bn takeover by Apollo

The offer is £7.15 a share in cash, and it only stood up after rival bidder Castlelake walked away. Shareholders, the UK courts and merger regulators all have to sign off, and completion is not expected before the first quarter of 2027.

easyJet is leaving the London stock market. The board has accepted an offer from Apollo Global Management valuing the airline at £5.7 billion, roughly 7.7 billion dollars, announced on 6 August just hours after rival bidder Castlelake confirmed it would not pursue a deal. The price is £7.15 a share in cash. The buyer, formally, is Eagle Bidco, a Jersey-incorporated company indirectly owned by funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Capital Management. The…

A transmission pylon silhouetted against a sunset sky, power lines running across the landscape

Business 7 August 2026

Portugal approves €1.6 billion to rebuild its electricity distribution grid

The 2026-2030 investment plan for the high and medium voltage distribution network cleared the Council of Ministers on Thursday, aimed at absorbing more renewables and a fast-electrifying economy.

On 6 August the Council of Ministers signed off the development and investment plan for Portugal's high and medium voltage electricity distribution network covering 2026 to 2030. The headline figure is €1.6 billion. This is the unglamorous half of the grid. The long-distance high voltage corridors are the ones you notice crossing the countryside; medium voltage is what leaves the substations and reaches neighbourhoods, mid-sized factories and charging…

Official Volta scheme image showing a plastic bottle travelling around the circular arrow of the deposit-return symbol

Business 7 August 2026

Do bottles without the Volta symbol vanish on Monday? No, and the agency has said so

The deposit-return scheme's transition period ends on 9 August, but stock already legally on the market can be sold until it runs out. Those containers carry no refund.

For weeks the understanding was that 10 August would be a hard stop, and that bottles and cans without the Volta symbol would have to come off the shelves. They will not. Portugal's environment agency has clarified that containers legally placed on the market during the transition period can be sold until the stock runs out, with no fixed cut-off. What actually changes on 10 August sits further up the chain. The obligation to join the deposit-return…

Tugadaily bar chart showing Portuguese public debt in May and June 2026, in millions of euros

Business 7 August 2026

Portugal's debt pile grew by 5.2 billion euros in a single month

Bank of Portugal figures put Maastricht-basis public debt at 293.9 billion euros in June, up from 288.7 billion in May and worth 92.9% of GDP. The government blames temporary deposits and is sticking to its 87.5% year-end target.

Portuguese public debt rose to 92.9% of GDP in the second quarter, 1.9 percentage points above the 91% recorded in the first. In cash terms that is roughly 293.9 billion euros in June against 288.7 billion in May. One month, 5.2 billion euros more. The increase cuts against the path the government has been promoting, and it arrived in a week when the other numbers were pointing the opposite way, with the economy accelerating in the second quarter and…

Tugadaily chart: unemployed people in Portugal in the first and second quarters of 2026, in thousands

Business 6 August 2026

45,500 fewer unemployed in three months, and a jobless rate not seen since 2011

Portugal's unemployment rate fell to 5.3% in the second quarter, down 0.8 percentage points on the first three months of the year. Employment reached 5.4 million people, the highest in 15 years.

There were 300,800 unemployed people in Portugal between April and June. Three months earlier there were 346,300. That gap — 45,500 people in a single quarter — pushed the unemployment rate down to 5.3%, the lowest since 2011, according to the INE Labour Force Survey released this week. The rate is down 0.8 percentage points on the previous quarter and 0.6 points on the same period of 2025. Employment rose at the same time, and rose sharply. The employed…

Business 6 August 2026

The US and Japan bought yen together for the first time since 1998

Tokyo and Washington confirmed a coordinated currency intervention to halt the yen's slide after it hit 40-year lows against the dollar. The Bank of Japan spent around ¥5.33 trillion in a single session.

Tokyo and Washington confirmed this week that they moved together in the currency markets to prop up the yen. It is the first joint yen-buying operation by the two countries since 1998, and the scale leaves little doubt about how uncomfortable both sides had become. Bank of Japan figures show roughly ¥5.33 trillion spent in Friday's session, following a record intervention of about ¥8.45 trillion the day before. Across three sessions the yen gained as…

Chart showing the financing ceilings for each strand of the Impulsar Portugal credit line

Business 6 August 2026

Portugal's development bank just opened a €1.5 billion credit line for companies

Four strands cover working capital, strategic investment, business start-ups and technical guarantees, with up to €25 million per company. Applications go through commercial banks.

Portugal's state development bank and the mutual guarantee societies opened a €1.5 billion facility for companies on Wednesday. It is called Impulsar Portugal, and it is the first time working capital, investment, start-up funding and technical guarantees have been bundled into a single instrument here. The four strands are worth very different amounts. Impulsar Curto Prazo runs to €7.5 million per company over 60 months, with a 50% mutual guarantee. This…