Court of Auditors Fires Back at the Government Over the Lisbon Oriental Hospital, Saying It Cleared the €800 Million Contract in 27 Working Days

Portugal's Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors) has publicly rejected the government's claim that its oversight delayed the new Hospital de Lisboa Oriental (Eastern Lisbon Hospital) and drove up its cost, turning a technical disagreement into a rare open quarrel between the state's spending watchdog and a sitting minister.

The dispute flared on 15 June, when the Minister Adjunct and for State Reform, Gonçalo Matias, told reporters that the court's mandatory prior-review process had set the hospital back "by years" and added "more than €164 million" to the bill. The remarks landed heavily because the court rarely answers political criticism in public, and because the project is one of the largest health-infrastructure undertakings in the country.

In a written response, the institution led by Filipa Urbano Calvão pushed back point by point. It said it took just "27 working days" to grant clearance to the hospital's management contract, a public-private partnership (PPP) worth more than €800 million over a 30-year term. On the court's account, the calendar months that elapsed were spent waiting on the contracting authority, not on its own desk.

The timeline it set out tells that story. The contract was submitted for prior review by the regional health authority on 21 February 2024. On 6 May 2024, the court notified the authority that clarifications were needed. Approval, with recommendations attached, followed on 28 May 2024 — within weeks of receiving the missing material.

The court also defended the substance of its scrutiny, saying it had flagged genuine problems rather than bureaucratic trivia. Among the "failures and illegalities" it identified were missing contractual pricing, the absence of a required ministerial authorisation, and modification clauses that did not comply with the rules. Up to €100 million of European recovery money was later folded into the financing, raising the stakes for getting the paperwork right.

For the government, the hospital has become a test of its pledge to speed up public works. The Eastern Lisbon Hospital is designed to consolidate several ageing central-Lisbon units into a single modern campus, and ministers have repeatedly cited delays as evidence that oversight bodies slow the state down. The court's reply reframes that argument: in its telling, the holdups originated inside the administration that drafted the contract, not in the body asked to vet it.

The exchange matters beyond a single building. The Tribunal de Contas signs off on the largest public contracts before they take effect, and its independence rests on its willingness to say no. A minister blaming it by name for cost overruns, and the court answering in kind, is an unusually direct collision between political accountability and financial control — and a reminder that, with billions in PPP commitments still flowing through the system, both sides have an interest in pinning the delay on the other.