DCIAP Loses 12 of Its 44 Prosecutors in Under Three Years and an Inspection Finds One in Five Did Not Meet Basic Requirements — The Ministério Público's Top Investigative Unit Heads Into 2026 Short-Staffed and Censured
DCIAP, the Ministério Público's top investigative unit, has lost 12 of 44 prosecutors in under three years. An inspection finds one in five did not meet basic qualification requirements and that justice-officer staffing is 'manifestly insufficient' in five of seven sections.
Portugal's Departamento Central de Investigação e Ação Penal — the Ministério Público unit that runs the most complex criminal cases in the country — has lost 12 of its 44 prosecutors in under three years, and an extraordinary inspection now closing concludes that roughly one in five of those still posted there did not meet the qualification standards the law sets for the role. Público's Mariana Oliveira broke the figures on Saturday morning. They land at the worst possible moment for the country's investigative architecture, with the post-Operação Influencer caseload and the post-Operação Marquês acquittal review weighing on a unit that has already been publicly censured for organisational drift.
What the inspection found
The audit was ordered in the closing weeks of former Procuradora-Geral Lucília Gago's term and ran across the period January 2022 to October 2024. Its preliminary findings, released through April, were already damning: organisational disarray, no internal regulations, uncontrolled access to sensitive files, seized material from searches still unanalysed three and a half years on, and a senior procurador — Rosário Teixeira, of Operação Marquês fame — formally censured for accumulating cases without dispatching them. The Saturday Público read adds the staffing dimension: 12 prosecutors gone, a fifth of those remaining below the qualification bar, and the support layer of oficiais de justiça rated 'manifestly insufficient' in five of the department's seven sections.
Why DCIAP matters
DCIAP is the only Ministério Público unit with national jurisdiction over violent and highly-organised crime, terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and economic-financial crimes that exceed the threshold for the standard regional Departamentos de Investigação e Ação Penal. Every politically-charged file in the past decade — from the BES collapse to Operação Marquês, Operação Influencer, the EDP/Galp probes, the Espírito Santo recovery and the various football-corruption cases — has run through it. A 27% headcount drop on the procurador side, against a backdrop of widening investigatory complexity, is not an HR statistic. It is the structural reason high-profile files keep stalling.
The recruitment problem
The article frames the crisis as one of attraction, not just retention. DCIAP postings are formally a promotion within the Ministério Público hierarchy, but the workload, the reputational exposure and the absence of a salary differential have made experienced senior magistrates unwilling to apply. The Sindicato dos Magistrados do Ministério Público — already on its second strike of 2026, against the Pacote Laboral and against pay-scale stagnation — flagged the same pipeline failure on 23 April, calling the broader Ministério Público 'em colapso'. The Saturday Público figures put numbers behind the union's wording.
What it changes for the months ahead
Three immediate exposures: the Operação Influencer file remains under DCIAP's primary direction even after the Public Ministry has been pushed by Chega's Monday-tabled comissão parlamentar de inquérito; the Marquês appeal calendar still rests with a dispatch chain that the inspection has now publicly described as broken; and the Espírito Santo recovery cases have been waiting on perícias the inspection lists as overdue. New PGR Amadeu Guerra takes over a unit whose institutional credibility is now an open question. Without a posting reform that genuinely sweetens the seat — pay differential, dedicated investigator support, fixed-term mandates — DCIAP is unlikely to refill the vacancies it has already lost.
For foreign residents and businesses, the practical read-through is patience: judicial-investigation timelines in Portugal's complex-crime track are getting longer, not shorter, and fraud or financial-crime files referred to DCIAP should be assumed to face multi-year delays before substantive movement.
