ANAC Moves to Annul the Clece/South Handling Win at Lisbon, Porto and Faro on Wednesday 13 May — Regulator Cites Insurance, Equipment, HR and Safety-Programme Defects, Hands Union South ACE Ten Business Days to Reply Before the 19 May Licence Cliff

The Autoridade Nacional da Aviação Civil — ANAC, the Portuguese civil aviation regulator — moved on Wednesday 13 May 2026 to unwind the most consequential ground-handling award the country has issued in a decade. In a formal notification sent to the parties on Wednesday, ANAC told the Union South ACE consortium — the grouping that pairs the Spanish multiservice giant Clece with South Europe Ground Services, the handler controlled by IAG's Iberia — that the regulator has reached a preliminary intention to exclude the consortium from the seven-year handling-licence tender covering the airports of Lisbon, Porto and Faro.

The Defect List

The notification, in the language of the Código do Procedimento Administrativo, walks the consortium through a stack of what ANAC calls 'cumulative formal and material defects' in the documentation Union South ACE filed in March 2026 to formalise the licence attribution. The defects fall into six families:

Insurance coverage — the regulator reads the policies as falling short of the cover demanded by the tender for ramp, baggage and aircraft-servicing operations.
Equipment availability — ANAC concludes the consortium has not demonstrated control of the ramp equipment fleet (tractors, GPUs, belt loaders, conveyors, push-back tugs) needed to staff the three airports from day one.
Human resources and training — the regulator reads gaps in the staffing plan and in the basic-licence training pipeline against the volumes the three airports already run.
Payroll and contributory documentation — the salary chain and Segurança Social filings as presented do not match the head-count blueprint.
Business plan — the projection submitted needs to be adjusted before ANAC will treat it as a credible operational base.
Safety programme — the security and safety-programme submission needs revisions ahead of any licence attribution.

How We Got Here

The handling tender — opened in 2024 under the regime that replaced the 1994 Decreto-Lei 275/99 architecture — was decided in January 2026 by the ANAC jury chaired by Sofia Simões, with the Clece/South consortium scoring 95.2523 against 93.0526 for incumbent SPdH-Serviços Portugueses de Handling, the operator built out of the former Groundforce and acquired by UK-based Menzies Aviation in 2024 (49.9% TAP / 50.1% Menzies). The Clece/South filing carried a transition plan that anticipated absorbing existing handling staff at the three airports — a politically sensitive feature given the 2021 Groundforce collapse and the 2024 Menzies takeover that followed.

SPdH challenged the jury decision in court and at ANAC, arguing the winning bid did not pass the operational-robustness test the tender demanded. The Wednesday notification confirms ANAC has now reached the same preliminary read on the documentation file.

The 19 May Licence Cliff

The existing handling licences at Lisbon, Porto and Faro — already extended once by Government decree in November 2025 — expire on Monday 19 May 2026. Without either a new winner formally licensed or a second extension, the legal frame under which Menzies/SPdH currently operates the ground-handling tape ends at midnight. The procedural sequence ANAC now triggers gives Union South ACE ten business days to file a written response to the preliminary exclusion — pushing the earliest formal exclusion decision into the back half of May.

The Menzies Response

Menzies Aviation, through SPdH, issued a same-day statement welcoming the regulator's read. The operator said ANAC's preliminary intention 'aligns with concerns' long raised about the 'operational robustness, credibility and sustainability' of the Clece/South proposal, and reaffirmed confidence in Portuguese regulatory institutions. Menzies currently employs around 3,500 workers across the Portuguese airport network and handled over 217,000 flights and 29 million passengers in 2025 — the operational base that will continue to serve the three airports through the procedural window if no replacement is licensed in time.

What This Means for Passengers

Summer-schedule continuity: the immediate practical question is whether ANAC's exclusion process, plus any Union South ACE response and any government licence extension, lets handling at Lisbon, Porto and Faro stay seamless through the June–September peak. Menzies is already on the tarmac; the realistic base case is that the incumbent continues to run the operation through the resolution window.
Baggage and connections risk: a botched transition between handlers — exactly what the Groundforce 2021 collapse triggered for the spring of that year — is the scenario the regulator's documentation read is meant to prevent. The market read of Wednesday's notification is that ANAC will not licence an operator it cannot confirm has the ramp equipment, insurance cover and trained head-count to switch on at day one.
TAP and Star Alliance connections: TAP holds 49.9% of SPdH — the same operator that ANAC's intervention de facto protects, at least through the procedural cycle. A Clece/South entry would have moved the handling base to an Iberia-controlled supplier, with non-trivial consequences for Star Alliance ground product at Lisbon, Porto and Faro and for the SkyTeam/Iberia interface there.
The next call: Union South ACE's 10-business-day written reply lands inside the same window that will force the Government to decide whether to extend the existing licences a second time. The package — exclusion decision plus extension decree — is the file that determines whether the seven-year handling map is settled this summer or pushed into a second tender round.