Castro Almeida Cuts Portugal's Industrial-Licensing Code From 600 to 200 Articles — Economy Minister Pitches 'Small Sines' Business Parks Across the Country and Revokes Multiple Decreto-Lei Diplomas to Accelerate Company Creation

Manuel Castro Almeida walks into the week with the boldest deregulation pitch of the second Montenegro government's young life. The Minister of Economy and Territorial Cohesion told Jornal de Negócios at the weekend that he intends to cut Portugal's industrial-licensing rulebook from 600 articles down to 200 — a two-thirds reduction designed to put speed back into a company-creation pipeline that has slowed measurably since the 2022-2024 rate cycle. The headline figure carries a second leg: a national plan to seed business parks Castro Almeida calls 'small Sines' across the territory, intended to give firms shovel-ready industrial land outside the historical Lisboa-Setúbal-Aveiro corridor.

What the 400 articles being cut actually are

The 600-article number captures the cumulative content of Portugal's main industrial-licensing decreto-lei framework plus the satellite portarias that have layered over it since the 2010s. The Sistema da Indústria Responsável, the AICOPA-style local-licensing tracks, the environment-impact pieces that hook into APA review and the urban-planning hooks at municipal level have produced what the minister, in his own framing, calls a 'mille-feuille' of cross-references that adds months to any greenfield project. Castro Almeida's working draft, sitting now in Conselho de Ministros review, revokes 'multiple diplomas' — the minister has not yet named them in public, but the obvious candidates are the 2015-vintage SIR diploma, the 2019 portaria on local-administration interfaces and several of the sector-specific licensing rules that duplicate central-government screening.

'Pequenos Sines' — the territorial leg

The minister's second pitch is geographic. The plan is to designate a dozen 'small Sines' business parks in regions outside the traditional industrial cluster, with pre-cleared environmental and urban-planning approvals, hooked into upgraded road and rail corridors, and offered to investors as turn-key sites. Sines itself sits at the centre of the data-centre wave — Start Campus, the Nscale-Sines venture announced earlier this month — but its model of one-window licensing plus port and energy infrastructure has not been replicated elsewhere in Portugal. The new programme would lean on the existing Plano Nacional de Acessibilidades 360º framework for transport links and on the Sustentável 2030 envelope for environmental upgrades. Castro Almeida did not give a budget number on the weekend interview.

The political timing

The 600-to-200 line drops into the same week the Trabalho XXI labour bill walks into Parliament without UGT or CGTP sign-off, after the Concertação Social froze last week. The Government's strategic framing of industrial-licensing simplification on one side and labour-market liberalisation on the other gives the AD coalition a coherent supply-side narrative even as the social-partner consensus collapses. The PSD's leadership, meanwhile, has flagged industrial-licensing as one of the 'reform priorities' Luís Montenegro wants on the table before the summer recess.

The catch: Parliament does not yet have the bill

The decreto-lei has not yet been published. Castro Almeida's weekend remarks frame the plan as advanced but not yet at the Conselho de Ministros sign-off stage. Once approved by Cabinet, the diploma walks through the Conselho de Estado consultation circuit before promulgation by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa — a sequencing the SNS doctor package on 7 May has just been through. The earliest plausible Diário da República publication is therefore early June. If the timetable holds, Portugal will enter the autumn with a new industrial-licensing code on top of a still-unsigned labour reform, an SNS regime that is mid-implementation and a Trabalho XXI bill working through Parliament. The legislative load on the Ministério da Economia desk has not been this dense since the 2018 IRC reform.

Sources: Jornal de Negócios, 10-11 May 2026; Ministério da Economia e Coesão Territorial press notes; Diário da República archive for the SIR diploma; previous Conselho de Ministros communiqués.