General Daily Briefing: Thursday, 17 September 2026
Good morning. Here is your Thursday briefing for 17 September 2026: the day's essential Portugal stories for residents, expats and anyone keeping an eye on the country, running from the taxi trade's decision to join the apps it spent a decade fighting to the ethics council's case for regulating artificial intelligence now rather than later.
- Transport: hundreds of taxi firms have applied to join Bolt since the rewritten ride-hailing law took effect on 1 September, and Uber says its own integration is close.
- Education: the parliamentary inquiry into the digital marking of the national exams has the votes to go ahead, after the Socialist leadership moved on Wednesday.
- Banking: the Banco de Portugal's resolution department changes hands with 7.5 billion euros still owed and the levy that funds it under constitutional challenge.
- Technology: a Lisbon satellite maker is spending two million euros on laser links for drones and a ground station that can transmit quantum keys.
- Society: victims of Church abuse take a dossier to Belem on Friday, asking the State to audit the compensation scheme and to abolish limitation periods.
- Ethics: the president of Portugal's bioethics council argues that the technology industry's own call for regulation is an opening that should be used.
Organ Donation in Portugal in 2026
Portuguese law counts every resident as a potential donor unless they have said otherwise, and that includes foreign residents who may have no idea the rule applies to them. Our new guide explains how the RENNDA non-donor register works, how to object in whole or only to particular organs, the four working days that pass before an objection takes effect, and the separate set of rules that governs donating a kidney or part of a liver while you are alive.
The Fundo de Garantia Salarial in Portugal in 2026
When a Portuguese employer goes under owing wages, a state fund pays part of what is owed, financed by employers and the State rather than by workers. It is also one of the easiest entitlements in the country to lose by waiting: the claim expires one year after the contract ends. The guide sets out who qualifies, what the fund covers, the 2,760 euro monthly ceiling, and how to file before the clock runs out.
Taxis Are Signing Up to the Apps They Spent a Decade Fighting
Since 1 September, a Portuguese company holding a taxi alvara may also hold a TVDE operator licence, the category that covers vehicles dispatched through Uber and Bolt. Bolt told ECO it has already received "hundreds of integration requests" from taxis, most from firms that have applied for the licence, concentrated "above all in the large urban centres and in the islands". Uber gave no numbers but says the integration is expected "very soon", that taxis can register through its website now, and that completing the process waits on a portaria that has not been published. A taxi on a platform trip gives up the trade's privileges for the duration: no street hailing, no taxi ranks, no bus lanes. Asked how it would police that, Bolt said its app already limits pick-ups in restricted zones but that "enforcement of compliance with transport legislation is the responsibility of the competent authorities". The trade is split. Carlos Silva, president of the Federacao Portuguesa do Taxi, said some operators refuse because TVDE vehicles "work at prices we consider abnormally low", while "others see that things are so bad that, if you cannot beat them, join them". Still missing, he added, are clarifications on procedures and on the maximum age of vehicles. Two other changes in the same law reach passengers directly: the 100 percent ceiling on surge pricing is gone, which Bolt says will show up at events where thousands request trips at once, and platforms may now offer an optional in-car video recording feature for safety purposes.
The Exam Marking Inquiry Has the Votes
A parliamentary commission of inquiry into how Portugal marked its 2025 and 2026 national exams now looks certain to be created. The Bloco de Esquerda tabled it and the Speaker admitted it at the start of July. On Tuesday the leader of Chega, Andre Ventura, said his party would vote for it, calling it "important that families feel there is work being done by Parliament". On Wednesday the Socialist national secretariat decided to recommend a yes vote to its MPs, who meet on Thursday; the vote in the chamber falls on Friday. The terms are more technical than the argument around them. The inquiry is asked to establish the scale of the failures alleged in the design, execution and supervision of the digital classification process, and to trace the consequences for students "in particular in access to higher education", for the teachers who marked the papers and for the wider school community. It also reaches the paperwork: the decisions, contracts, costs and supervision mechanisms, and the entities involved. A fourth strand asks what the reorganisation of the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation did to the system, naming AGSE, EduQA, I.P. and the restructured Juri Nacional de Exames. The Socialists say the "dismantling of the Ministry of Education" has hit both the exams and the start of the school year, and that they had been preparing an inquiry of their own because their questions went unanswered. On the same day the education committee approved two Chega requests for urgent hearings of the minister, Fernando Alexandre, and his predecessor Joao Costa, over PISA results that put Portuguese fifteen-year-olds back where they were two decades ago.
Bank Resolution Changes Hands With the Bill Unpaid
The sale of Novobanco to France's BPCE closed the most expensive file in modern Portuguese banking without closing the account. Jose Alvarez has been appointed director of the Resolution Department at the Banco de Portugal, a promotion from deputy after an internal competition, with the lawyer Joana Margarido as his deputy. The post opened when Joao Freitas moved in June to run Prudential Supervision. A third seat is empty: Luis Maximo dos Santos is at the end of his term as deputy governor and his mandate chairing the Fundo de Resolucao expired in March, with the successor a government appointment that may come within weeks. What the new team inherits is arithmetic. The resolutions of BES in 2014 and Banif in 2015, plus the capital injections into Novobanco between 2017 and 2021, left the fund owing 7.5 billion euros: 6.4 billion lent by the State and 1.1 billion by the banks. On top sits at least 630 million euros in compensation to BES creditors under the no creditor worse off rule, claimable from December at around 32 percent of recognised claims. Against that the fund holds assets worth about 2.2 billion euros, covering roughly 30 percent of its liabilities; the Novobanco sale brought in more than 900 million. The gap is closed by the annual contributions the banking sector pays, and in July the Constitutional Court found the rule setting the rate of the additional contributions unconstitutional. Other banks have signalled they may bring their own challenges, and the central bank is assessing the implications.
A Laser Link for Drones, and a Ground Station That Sends Quantum Keys
LusoSpace, the Lisbon company behind the Constelacao Lusiada, is spending more than two million euros on communications equipment for the armed forces. The first project, Orion, running since June, carries 1.99 million euros from the Recovery and Resilience Plan, of which 596,490 has been disbursed, with delivery due on 31 May 2028. It has two halves: radio-frequency satellite communication for ships and aircraft using VDES, which the chief executive Ivo Vieira describes as low bandwidth but highly resilient, so that "even when there are storms, it keeps communicating well"; and an optical terminal designed to sit inside a drone. The laser's appeal is security. "The only way for somebody to hear what we are going to say is to place themselves in the path of the beam, and then we can immediately observe that a vehicle is there and we interrupt the communication," Vieira said. It is also immune to jamming. The Navy and Air Force are expected to set requirements at a later phase, and the Army is watching. The second project is an optical receiving station that can also transmit quantum keys, built with the Instituto de Telecomunicacoes in Aveiro and funded with about one million euros from the European Space Agency's ScyLight programme; it should be finished in around a year. In March the company launched four satellites with SpaceX, named Camoes, Agustina, Pessoa and Saramago, as part of a 15 million euro investment. Four more are built and waiting for launch slots, and the stated ambition is 50 satellites in orbit within five years.
Fifty-Seven Payments Against an Estimate of 4,815 Victims
The independent commission set up by the Portuguese Catholic Church validated 512 testimonies and estimated that 4,815 people were abused as children in the Church in Portugal. According to the association that represents them, 57 have been compensated. On Friday the association Coracao Silenciado takes a dossier to Belem for President Antonio Jose Seguro, with two requests. The first is that the State abolish the limitation period for child sexual abuse. "Limitation periods for sexual abuse of minors cannot exist, because the trauma does not expire in the head and in the body of the victims," the spokesman Antonio Grosso told Lusa, arguing that victims typically speak only 30 or 40 years later, by which time "the abuser's crime has already expired". The second is an audit of the compensation process itself, which he described as "developed behind closed doors, begun on its own initiative and closed on its own initiative". Grosso says the hearings caused further harm, with long interviews in which claimants could not be accompanied, and that they are barred from reading the reports written about them on which the payments were based. Some cases did not proceed because files were archived at the Vatican or involved clergy of other nationalities. The association's case for State involvement rests on placement: many of the children were sent to convents, seminaries and casas de gaiatos by public services that then supervised nothing. In April the outgoing president of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, Jose Ornelas, put the Church's total spending on investigations, support and compensation at three million euros, with individual awards between 9,000 and 45,000 euros.
The Ethics Council Says the Opening on AI Rules Will Not Last
The companies building the most advanced artificial intelligence systems have spent recent months asking to be regulated, and Maria do Ceu Patrao Neves, president of the Conselho Nacional de Etica para as Ciencias da Vida, thinks that request should be taken at face value. Speaking to Lusa from the fourth UNESCO Global Forum on the Ethics of AI in Riyadh, she said public opinion "has woken up to the effective and imminent risks of an artificial intelligence that has been advancing at a very, very accelerated and also ungoverned pace", after incidents suggesting systems had escaped the control of the firms that built them. "If what they want is in fact regulation, then we should take advantage of it." Her case is that rules protect the weaker party: "Without regulation, any scientific or technological advance will be held hostage by those who are already powerful and who become more powerful." Regulation, she added, "is not a prohibition on innovation". She is sharp about what she calls the myth of the technology, noting that AI "has hallucinations, it makes mistakes and, besides, it has no human sensitivity, no cultural sensitivity and no affective sensitivity". On the geopolitics she is pessimistic: "Today the conditions are adverse" for a global solution, with states "competing with each other". Her proposal is to try anyway, seating industry and world leaders at one table for "an elementary minimum governance", with the European Union making the first move. The Riyadh forum drew more than 80 countries; Portugal presented Amalia, its home-grown language model, the Mosaico public services model, and an AI guide with an ethical risk assessment tool.
