Caixa Geral de Depósitos's Friday AGM Routes a Record €1.25 Billion Dividend to the State on 29 May — Share Capital Vaults From €4.5 Billion to €6 Billion as Paulo Macedo's Bank Pulls €300 Million From Reserves to Top Up the Payout
CGD's 29 May AGM signs off €1.25 billion dividend to the State drawn from 2025 results plus €300M of reserves, and approves a €1.5B capital increase lifting share capital to €6 billion.
The Ministério das Finanças sat as the sole shareholder of Caixa Geral de Depósitos on Friday 29 May and signed off on the largest dividend in the State-owned bank's history: €1.25 billion drawn from 2025 results, with €925 million coming from the year's profits and a further €300 million pulled out of accumulated reserves so that Paulo Macedo's management could deliver the full envelope the Tesouro had pencilled into the 2026 Orçamento do Estado.
The AGM also approved a capital increase from €4.5 billion to €6 billion — a €1.5 billion uplift effected by incorporating roughly €630 million of accumulated reserves into share capital alongside the mandatory legal-reserves portion of nearly €400 million. The mechanics, in plain terms: the State is not putting in new money the way it did in the 2017 recapitalisation; the bank is converting profits and reserves it has been holding into a more permanent capital base, leaving CGD with a thicker CET1 cushion ahead of any downturn.
The numbers behind the cheque deserve a second read. CGD closed 2025 with €1.9 billion in net profit, a 10% lift on 2024, on the back of fat net-interest-income spreads, a benign cost-of-risk and one of the lowest cost-to-income ratios in the eurozone. That earnings tape made CGD the most profitable bank in the Portuguese system by ROE for the third consecutive year, and gave the Macedo team room to argue for an over-distribution from reserves.
For the Tesouro, the timing is precious. IGCP issued a €3 billion 20-year sindicada at 3.875% a week earlier on a 18× order book, marking off roughly 60% of the 2026 €24 billion funding programme. Add the €1.25 billion CGD dividend and the State has effectively front-loaded a meaningful chunk of its budgetary cushion ahead of the European Commission's flagged return to deficit (0.1% in 2026, widening to 0.4% in 2027) and the back-end of Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência disbursements.
The Friday AGM resolution also gives CGD a fresh structural look. With share capital at €6 billion and the residual after legal reserves and dividends still adding more than €600 million to broader equity, the bank's book value per share-equivalent rises sharply, and the CET1 fully-loaded ratio strengthens. That positioning matters because Banco de Portugal's 27 May Financial Stability Report flagged a correction in residential real-estate prices as the principal internal risk for the Portuguese financial system — and CGD's mortgage book is the largest in the country.
Two political and one technical thread sit on top of the file. Politically, the State extracting €1.25 billion from the bank it owns is sensitive at a moment when the labour-reform package and 3 June general strike dominate the news cycle and the Operação Imergente probe has shaken the PS. The Government's framing will lean on the structural-capital story, not the cheque. Technically, the AGM also discharged the 2025 management board and renewed audit-committee mandates, ensuring continuity through the next strategic-plan window. And the regulatory thread — the BdP-requested binding macroprudential powers — would, if granted, affect CGD's mortgage origination more than any peer's, given its 28%-of-stock market share.
For now, the headline reads clean: the State-owned bank just sent the State the biggest dividend cheque in its history and tightened its capital base in the same sitting.
