Isaltino Morais Refused a €2,550 Fine, So the Court of Auditors Will Try Him Over Dozens of Oeiras Appointments Made Without a Competition

Isaltino Morais was offered the cheapest exit Portuguese public-finance law allows. He turned it down. The mayor of Oeiras refused to pay a fine of €2,550 to close a Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors) file on dozens of senior appointments made at his council without a competition, and the case now goes to trial before the court's Third Section on a date still to be fixed.

He is not going alone. The mayor of Seixal, Paulo Silva, and his predecessor in that office, Joaquim Santos, face trial on the same practice. The reporting came from Público on Friday evening and was carried by Observador the same night.

What the audit found

The file starts with a Tribunal de Contas audit published in May, which we covered at the time. Auditors examined the senior management posts at Oeiras and found 49 dirigentes (directing officers) appointed em regime de substituição, a stopgap mechanism, who had run far past the window the law allows for it. The court's phrase was that once the deadline passes, an officer who stays in post does so "without legal legitimacy."

At Seixal the ratio was starker still: 60 of the council's 73 directing posts were being held on the same temporary basis.

Oeiras has not shrunk the practice since. The council told Público it currently has 58 directing officers in substituição, nine more than the audit counted. Some had been sitting in their posts for years with no competition ever opened, and in other cases the appointees' curricula vitae were never published in the Diário da República, which is itself a breach.

After the audit came out, Isaltino Morais appointed another directing officer, this one for public-space management, again in substituição, citing "administrative and bureaucratic difficulties inherent in opening competitive procedures of this nature."

The 90-day rule, and why it is not a technicality

The mechanism at issue sits in Article 27 of Lei n.º 2/2004, the Estatuto do Pessoal Dirigente (Statute of Directing Personnel), which applies to municipal councils through Lei n.º 49/2012. It is written for genuine gaps. A directing post may be filled in substituição when the holder is absent or impeded and the obstacle is expected to last more than 60 days, or when the post falls vacant.

Then comes the clock. Article 27(3): the substitution ends when the holder returns to duty, or 90 days after the post fell vacant, unless a procedure to designate a new holder is already under way. Article 27(4) adds a second deadline at the other end of the process: even where a competition is running, the substitution ends compulsorily if, 45 days after the selection panel hands over its proposed appointment, the competent authority has still not made the appointment.

Two things follow that are worth stating plainly, because the loose reporting of this case tends to blur them.

First, the escape clause is not satisfied by intending to open a competition. The Tribunal de Contas settled that in Acórdão n.º 33/2023 of 5 December 2023 and again in Acórdão n.º 12/2024 of 10 April 2024. The court held that the notice of the competition, published under Articles 19(2) and 21(2) of the statute, "constitutes the marker from which the procedure is to be considered under way." Until the aviso is published, the clock is still running. The court also held that a post never occupied by anyone counts as vacant for these purposes, closing off a reading under which brand-new posts would sit outside the rule.

Second, the court classified the breach. Prolonging an interim appointment past 90 days without a published competition notice is, in the court's words, an unlawful act, and failing to terminate it is an unlawful omission. It falls under Article 65(1)(b) of the Lei de Organização e Processo do Tribunal de Contas (Law on the Organisation and Procedure of the Court of Auditors), the provision covering breaches of the rules on assuming, authorising or paying public expenditure. That is what makes it a sanctionable financial infraction rather than an administrative irregularity, and that is why a mayor can be personally fined for it.

Where the €2,550 comes from

The figure is not arbitrary and it is not a settlement negotiated between the parties. Article 65(2) of the same law sets the fine range for these infractions at 25 to 180 UC. The UC is the unidade de conta processual, the accounting unit used across the Portuguese courts, fixed at €102 and frozen there again for 2026 by Article 242 of the State Budget. Twenty-five units is €2,550.

Article 65(3) is the part that matters here: if the responsible party pays the fine before the Ministério Público's application reaches the court, the amount payable is the minimum. In other words, €2,550 was the floor of the entire scale, available only by paying early and skipping the hearing. Refusing it does not cap the exposure at that number. The ceiling for a single infraction is 180 UC, or €18,360, and where the infraction is committed with intent rather than negligence the statutory floor rises to a third of the maximum.

The relevação he asked for, and did not get

Before the case reached this point, Isaltino Morais asked the Tribunal de Contas to waive his financial responsibility altogether. That request has a name and a legal home: relevação, under Article 65(9), which lets the court's First and Second Sections release a party from an infraction punishable only by a fine.

The waiver has three conditions, and they are cumulative. The fault must be attributable only to negligence. There must have been no earlier recommendation from the Court of Auditors or from any internal control body telling the service to correct the same irregularity. And it must be the first time the court or an internal control body has censured that person for the practice.

The court refused, pointing to the scale of the alleged illegality, "which perpetuates itself since at least 2018." That reasoning maps onto the statutory test almost line for line: an irregularity running for seven years is hard to present as an isolated lapse of negligence, and a practice continuing after an audit has flagged it is hard to present as never having been censured.

What each side says

Both councils give the same defence, and it is not a frivolous one. Isaltino Morais's office says competitions "end up going unfilled, forcing the municipality to keep directing officers in substituição so as not to paralyse the running of operational areas." Paulo Silva says the difficulty is constituting the selection panels. In its response to the May audit, Oeiras also pointed to five reorganisations of its services between 2018 and 2026.

Whether any of that amounts to a legal defence is precisely what a trial decides. Article 65(7) lets the court reduce the fine specially where circumstances substantially diminish the unlawfulness or the fault, and Article 65(8) lets it waive the fine entirely where fault is slight. A deserted competition is the kind of fact those provisions exist for. The harder point for both councils is the one the doctrine has already fixed: the statute asks whether the aviso was published within 90 days, not whether the competition succeeded.

There is also a matter of proof. In Acórdão n.º 33/2023 the Court of Auditors laid down the doctrine and then acquitted the defendant, because the facts established at first instance did not include the date the competition notice was published or the date the panel handed over its proposal. Without those dates the court could not find a breach of Article 27(3) or 27(4). The doctrine is settled; the dates still have to be proved case by case.

Isaltino Morais has not been diplomatic about the institution now trying him. During the parliamentary argument over abolishing the court's visto prévio (prior approval) regime, he called the Tribunal de Contas "a blocking force" and its president, Filipa Calvão, a "shadow finance minister for Chega."

Why this matters beyond two councils

Substituição is a national habit, not a local one, and the Court of Auditors has been signalling for two years that it intends to treat it as a financial infraction rather than a paperwork lapse. The mechanism is convenient for a mayor: it fills a post immediately, with a person of the mayor's choosing, without a panel, without published criteria and without the delay of a competition. Article 27(2) is explicit that the ordinary requirements for the post still apply, with the sole exception of the competitive procedure.

Lei n.º 49/2012 also fixes an order of preference that is easy to overlook. Article 19 says the substitution goes first to the holder of a directing post of the immediately lower grade and level in the hierarchy, and only then to a worker who meets the legal recruitment conditions for the post. It is not a free choice of candidate.

The trial matters because it will produce a judgment about a specific mayor rather than a general finding about a sector. Audits recommend. Judgments in the Third Section fine named individuals, out of their own pockets.

What This Means for Expats

• Who decides your file may not have been chosen by competition. If you deal with a Portuguese council on licensing, urbanism, public space or social services, the head of the division signing your decision may be an interim appointee. This has no effect on the validity of the decisions themselves, which stand regardless, but it explains the turnover you may notice in who handles a long-running file.
• Personal financial liability is real in Portuguese public office. The system some newcomers assume is toothless does fine individuals. The scale runs from €2,550 to €18,360 per infraction, paid by the officeholder, not the council. It is worth knowing when you read that a mayor is "going to the Court of Auditors": it is a court, and it can order payment.
• The Court of Auditors is a usable public record. Its audits, judgments and rulings are published in full on tcontas.pt, free, and they are often the most detailed account available of how your municipality is actually run. If you are researching a council before buying property or starting a business in its area, the audit reports are more informative than any council communication.
• Deserted competitions are a genuine constraint, and they touch service quality. Both councils say they cannot fill posts or even staff the panels. That is the same recruitment squeeze that shows up in slow licensing, thin technical teams and long waits at municipal counters. Delays you experience often trace back to a post nobody applied for.
• This is a separate matter from the criminal case. Isaltino Morais was charged in March along with 22 others over roughly €150,000 in municipal spending on meals. The Court of Auditors process is distinct: different court, different law, financial rather than criminal liability. Coverage that runs them together is misleading.

No trial date has been set. When it comes, it will be heard in the Third Section, which sits in Lisbon and which publishes its judgments. The question in front of the judges will be narrow and factual: on what date did each post fall vacant, and on what date, if ever, was the competition notice published. Seven years of practice at two councils turns on the answer.