For Four Decades the Constitutional Court Had No List of the Officials Who Owed It an Asset Declaration, and It Has Now Put That in Writing
Public bodies were supposed to report every appointment since 1995 and largely did not. Without that list the court could count what arrived, but never work out what was missing.
For four decades the Constitutional Court was the body where Portugal's politicians and senior public officials deposited their declarations of income, assets and interests. It has now confirmed in writing that, throughout that period, it did not know who those people were.
The admission comes in a reply to a parliamentary request from Fabian Figueiredo, the Bloco de Esquerda's sole member of parliament, and is signed by the court's vice-president, Rui Guerra da Fonseca. The court states plainly that it "had no record or register of the universe of holders subject to declaration obligations".
Two reasons, both structural
The first is that the public bodies where those officials worked were supposed to tell the court when someone took up or left a post, and largely did not. The obligation dates from 1995 and falls on the administrative secretariats of the employing entity. The court describes a "consistent lack of cooperation from the public entities in which the holders performed their duties", across a universe it calls "vast and very diversified", and says the provision was "frequently disregarded".
The second is that the court was carrying out the task, in its own words, "with scarce human resources and without a working tool adequate to controlling compliance with the delivery of declarations". It says it wrote to municipal councils and to ministry secretariats-general asking them to identify the officials concerned, but that "no systematic record of those situations was made".
The consequence is arithmetical. Without a list of who owed a declaration, the court could count what arrived but could never calculate what was missing.
The numbers it does have
The court was able to say how many declarations came in from holders of first-degree senior management posts. The series runs 444 in 2011, 863 in 2012, 959 in 2013, 637 in 2014, 769 in 2015, 740 in 2016, 1,121 in 2017 and 1,022 in 2018, then 685 in 2019. It collapses after that: 182 in 2020, 59 in 2021 and 56 in 2022, recovering to 252 in 2023 and 76 by March 2024.
Formal notifications sent for failure to deliver are far scarcer. There were none at all in 2019, 2020 or 2021, eight in 2022, five in 2023 and one up to 6 March 2024. No certificate of non-compliance was issued in that period.
Why first-degree posts matter now
Law 52/2019 expressly lists holders of first and second-degree senior management posts among the high public officials covered by the declaration regime, and the court had already settled the question in ruling 171/2011. Asked by the Bloco whether it began tracking that group specifically after the ruling, the court's answer is one sentence: "No specific procedure was adopted regarding those holders."
That category includes the national director of the Polícia Judiciária. Luís Neves, who held the post from 2018 until this year and is now Minister of Internal Administration, filed no declaration for those years and has said he was never notified to do so. The court's judges have already censured him over it.
The model has since changed. Between 1983 and March 2024 the court held the declarations while the Public Prosecution Service, working alongside it, analysed their content. Organic Law 4/2019 handed both functions to the Entidade para a Transparência, whose electronic platform went live on 7 March 2024. Asked how many analyses were carried out under the old system, the court replies that the question is one for the prosecutors.
