Another investigation lands on Luís Neves. This one comes from Luxembourg
The European Public Prosecutor has asked Portugal's judicial police for paperwork on 17 building contracts worth €2.23 million. Three went to open tender.
The Luís Neves affair has picked up an investigator who answers to nobody in Lisbon. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has asked Portugal’s judicial police, the PJ, for a broad set of documents covering building work awarded during the years the current interior minister ran the force, and has already met its serving national director, Carlos Cabreiro.
The contracts in question went to Construbarcelos, the firm that carried out refurbishment and construction at PJ premises. Together they are worth more than €2.23 million and cover, among others, the force’s Guarda directorate and its local criminal investigation unit in Évora. Of the 17 contracts identified, three went to open tender. The other fourteen took routes that skip competitive bidding.
Why Luxembourg gets a say
The EPPO is the European Union’s own prosecution service, based in Luxembourg and set up to pursue crimes against the EU budget: fraud, corruption, money laundering involving European funds. When a Portuguese public works project is financed even partly by EU money, the file can be claimed by Brussels rather than left entirely to national authorities. That is what gives this request its weight. Formally it is a verification step, and it does not depend on who is in government in Lisbon.
Neves had already published 108 invoices trying to close the matter down after it emerged that a PJ contractor had done private work at his country property, and parliament has since approved an inquiry into his years running the force. This new front runs in parallel, on its own timetable.
What happens next
Nobody has been charged, and nobody is formally a suspect. A verification step exists to establish whether there is enough to justify opening a full investigation. It can end in nothing. It can also escalate. The PJ has to hand over what was asked for, and most of the contracts are already public on Portugal’s BASE public procurement portal, where anyone can check values, dates and the procedure used. The EPPO sets out its own remit and casework on its official site.
For the government the difficulty is arithmetic. An interior minister under scrutiny from the presidency, parliament and now Luxembourg at the same time spends political capital that does not come back.
Chart: Tugadaily · data from Polícia Judiciária public contracts
