Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: PSI Carries a 3.5% August Into Its Last Session, BCP Buys Its Own Stock, Mota-Engil Contests the Rail Award

Weekend Wrap: a Third Straight Weekly Gain, and August Still Has One Session Left

Euronext Lisbon is shut for the weekend, so this is a weekend edition written off Friday's closing bell. The PSI (Portuguese Stock Index) ended Friday, 28 August, at 9,430.91 points, up 0.44% on the day. Across the five sessions the index went from 9,354.78 to 9,430.91, a gain of 76.13 points or 0.81%, and that is a third consecutive weekly advance.

One correction to yesterday's briefing, because it changes what Monday means. We described Friday as the last trading day of August. It was not: 31 August falls on a Monday this year, so Lisbon has one more session before the month is booked. As things stand the index is up 314.87 points on the 9,116.04 at which it finished July, a rise of 3.45%, and Monday will decide whether August is recorded as a three-and-a-half percent month or something either side of it. Either way it is the strongest month Lisbon has had this year, and it leaves the index 0.90% below its 52-week peak of 9,516.43.

The week itself was less smooth than the weekly number suggests. Lisbon rose on Monday to 9,391.96, rose again on Tuesday to 9,445.44, then did almost nothing on Wednesday, adding 0.95 points to 9,446.39, which was the week's best close. Thursday took 0.60% back out on a European session that turned against nearly everything, and Friday put 0.44% of it back. Four up days, one down day, and a net move of less than one percent: the tape spent the week going sideways with a slight upward bias rather than trending.

Leadership rotated as it went. The middle of the week belonged to the utilities and the paper names; Friday belonged to the banks, with BCP, or Banco Comercial Português, up 1.17% to €1.12, which is its highest close in eleven years. Corticeira Amorim added 0.71% to €7.07, EDP Renováveis (EDP Renewables) 0.73% and EDP 0.69%. The most telling number on Friday was the worst one: Ibersol fell 0.58% to €10.36, which means the biggest loser on the board that day gave up six cents. Sellers were not present in any quantity.

The overnight event we flagged has also landed, and it landed quietly. S&P Global Ratings published its half-yearly review after Lisbon closed and held Portugal at A+ with a positive outlook, while cutting its 2026 growth forecast to 1.7%. That is the consensus outcome, so it should not move the bond market on Monday; the growth revision is the part worth carrying forward, because a slower economy and a positive outlook are an awkward pair to hold for another six months.

BCP Spent €16.2 Million Buying Itself in the Week It Reached an Eleven-Year High

There was one identifiable buyer in the market for BCP shares every single day this week, and it was BCP. The bank's interim buyback report, filed on Friday, shows it acquired more than 14.4 million of its own shares between Monday 24 and Friday 28 August for roughly €16.16 million, at weighted average prices running from €1.1035 on the Monday to €1.1193 on the Friday.

That takes the running total to 156,169,904 shares bought for €165,151,939, or 1.05% of the bank's capital. The programme itself we covered when it launched: €407,458,786 at most, covering up to 2.84% of capital, announced on 27 May, running from 4 June to 4 December. Twelve weeks into a twenty-six week window, the bank has spent 40.5% of the authorised amount, which is very slightly behind an even pace and well within the range a company keeps for itself when it wants flexibility about price.

Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions. The first is mechanical: a bank buying roughly €3 million of its own stock a day in a market as thin as Lisbon's is a meaningful share of the daily volume in that line, and it is part of why BCP has been able to grind to an eleven-year high on no company news at all. The buyback is not the whole story, but anyone reading the price as a pure verdict on the business is reading incompletely.

The second is the juxtaposition we wrote about yesterday. BCP's treasury now holds 1.05% of its own capital. BlackRock's disclosed net short position in the same company, as we reported from the CMVM register on Friday, is 1.4%. The largest asset manager in the world is short more of this bank than the bank has so far managed to retire, and this week both of them were wrong about the direction of the price in the same trade, one profitably and one not. The buyback is funded out of the distribution pledge attached to first-quarter profit that rose 25.6% to €305.8 million, so it is being paid for out of earnings rather than out of leverage, which is the distinction that matters when the buying eventually stops in December.

Mota-Engil Has Ten Days to Argue That 8.381 Out of 20 Should Not Win a Railway

On Wednesday we reported that Mota-Engil had won a $1.8 billion contract in the Democratic Republic of Congo and lost the Oiã to Soure high-speed rail section at home. It is now contesting the second half of that.

The Lusolav consortium, which brings together Mota-Engil and six other Portuguese builders, was excluded after the tender jury recommended awarding the section to Sacyr, DST and ACA, according to reporting in Jornal de Negócios. Lusolav has ten days to respond to the preliminary report, and its argument is unusually blunt. Chief executive Carlos Mota Santos disputes both the exclusion and the score attached to the winning bid, which came in at 8.381 out of 20. "I had never seen a tender with an intention to award to a proposal with an evaluation that is not even positive," he said.

That is the whole of the case in one sentence, and it is a fair question on its face. A procurement process that eliminates one bidder and then awards the work to a proposal the jury itself has graded below half marks is either evidence that both bids were poor, or evidence that the scoring model is not measuring what the tender says it measures. Lusolav has also alleged that the competing proposal exceeds by €186 million the maximum cost set for the works in the Coimbra area, which connects to the awkwardness we reported on 14 August, when the frontrunner admitted it had dropped the four-track section at Coimbra that the tender required. Coimbra is where this contract keeps snagging.

Sacyr, DST and ACA have been in this file since they became the first public bidder for the €5.4 billion concession in April, on a relaunched tender that only exists because the 2024 procurement drew nobody. That history is the reason this dispute matters beyond the two consortia. A tender that struggled to attract bidders at all, and that now looks likely to be awarded to a proposal scoring 8.381, is not a strong advertisement for the process that has to deliver the rest of the Lisbon to Porto line. Mota Santos was careful to say that Lusolav's interest in future high-speed tenders "is not in question", which is the polite way of saying the group intends to keep bidding whatever happens here.

Pharol Changes Its Leadership, and the Asset It Inherits Is Worth Six Cents on the Euro

Pharol told the market on Friday that its board has given the role of administrador-delegado (chief executive) to Bernardo Amado, and confirmed that João Moreira Rato has clearance to serve as chairman. Between them they replace Palha da Silva, who ran the company for about a decade, since the sale of the Meo operator to Altice. Rafaela Andrade joins the new board, and João Ferreira Marques was appointed alternate director at a general meeting roughly a month ago.

Moreira Rato's appointment needed a regulator's signature. He is an economist, a former head of the IGCP, or Agência de Gestão da Tesouraria e da Dívida Pública (Treasury and Public Debt Management Agency), and he has spent the past year as a non-executive director of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, which is why the Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal) had to approve him taking a second board seat. Pharol says that authorisation came through on 5 August.

What the new leadership actually inherits is worth stating plainly, because Pharol is not an operating company in any ordinary sense. Its principal asset is a problem credit of €897 million arising from the ruinous investment in Rio Forte commercial paper, and the company expects to recover €52 million of it, which is 6%. In the first half it recorded a loss of €970,000, against a profit of more than €2 million in the same period of 2025, and it attributes the swing to the absence of significant tax refunds and to the payment of bonuses.

This is the third time in eight days that this briefing has had to describe a Portuguese balance sheet whose defining feature is a receivable nobody expects to collect. Yesterday it was the Gama Leão insolvency closing at €57,800 against €392.7 million of claims. Pharol's ratio is far better, at six cents on the euro rather than one and a half cents in every hundred, but it is the same era and the same paper. What is genuinely new here is only the governance: a company built around a decade-old claim has changed the people managing it, and a former public debt manager is now chairing the pursuit of a private one.

A Newspaper Tender Turns on Whether a Fire Station Counts as a Newsstand

In June we covered the government opening a €3 million international tender to distribute daily newspapers across 96 low-density municipalities. The preliminary result is in, both lots have gone to Vasp, and the losing bidder is contesting it in detail.

Start with the arithmetic, because the state has done well out of this. Against a base price of €3.08 million for three years, Vasp, the company controlled by Marco Galinha, won at €2.3 million, a saving of roughly 25%, or €763,000 a year for the two lots combined: North and Centre, and West and Tagus Valley, Greater Lisbon, Setúbal Peninsula, Alentejo and Algarve.

Pergaminhoflash, led by Rui Marques Santos, has exercised its direito de audição (right to be heard) on the preliminary report. Its core observation is structural: the 5.47 points separating the two bidders came entirely from the price factor, because both scored the maximum on geographic dispersion. That criterion is worth 100 points and depends on having five points of sale in each low-density municipality, so if the winning bid's list of outlets does not hold up, the scores move.

Pergaminhoflash says it does not hold up. It alleges that Vasp's list counts as points of sale a private dwelling in Monchique, a firefighters' association in Aljezur, two municipal libraries in Vila de Rei and Vila Nova de Foz Côa, a CTT shop in Mêda, and ten further CTT shops in other low-density municipalities. Two arguments follow. The tender specification requires each point to operate at least 300 days a year, and a facility open only on weekdays reaches 252 at most. And CTT's own published list of services for its shops includes books, but not newspapers or magazines. On Pergaminhoflash's reading of the award criterion, Vasp would fall from 65.00 to 52.50 points and one of the two lots would change hands.

There is a second allegation, about price formation. Pergaminhoflash points out that Vasp's discounts against the base prices come to exactly 30% and 20%, mathematically precise to the cent, and argues that this is hard to square with Vasp's account that the figures were built up from the real cost structure of the operation. It has asked the jury to verify the specific locations named and the basis on which the price was set. Pergaminhoflash is held by a company incorporated in June by José Manuel Rogeira de Jesus, who owns Parsoc and FEPI and is the majority shareholder in the owner of Jornal de Notícias and O Jogo, so this is a contest between two parts of the Portuguese media industry as much as between two logistics operators.

The wider point is about what the state was actually buying. This contract exists because commercial newspaper distribution to thinly populated municipalities does not pay for itself, and the tender uses points of sale as its proxy for reach. If a library that opens on weekdays and a post office counter that does not sell newspapers can both be counted as a point of sale, then the proxy has stopped measuring the thing the subsidy was designed to secure. That is a question for the jury rather than for us, and it now has ten days of arguments to read.

Bonds, the Euro, Savings Certificates at Their Legal Ceiling, and a Smaller Fuel Rebate

Portugal's ten-year Obrigações do Tesouro (Treasury bonds) finished the week yielding 3.63%, about two basis points higher on Friday. The German ten-year Bund rose more, roughly four basis points to 3.29%, its highest since March 2011, so the spread narrowed to about 34 basis points, close to the tightest on record. That compression is not a compliment to Portugal so much as a description of what is happening to German yields. The euro was unmoved: the European Central Bank's reference rate fixed at $1.1643 on Friday, against $1.1645 on Thursday.

Euribor kept climbing, and it has now pushed a state savings product into its statutory ceiling. The base rate on Certificados de Aforro Série F is set monthly from the average of three-month Euribor over the ten relevant business days, rounded to three decimal places, and it cannot exceed 2.5% however high that average goes. In August it paid 2.474%, as we reported at the start of the month. With three-month Euribor fixing at 2.573% on Friday, new subscriptions in September will pay the full 2.5% and the cap will start to bite. Permanence premiums are added on top of the base rate and are not subject to the ceiling, so a long-standing saver can still earn more than 2.5% in total; what a new saver cannot do, from September onwards, is capture any further rise in Euribor through the base rate. For anyone comparing the certificates with a deposit, that is the moment the product stops tracking the market.

The same rate move lands rather less pleasantly on borrowers, and we set out this morning what a September reset adds to a Portuguese home loan: between €23 and €70 a month, the steepest single reset since late 2023. The Governing Council meets in Berlin on 9 and 10 September with the market pricing a deposit rate of 2.80% by March, against 2.25% today.

At the pump, the government has trimmed rather than widened its support. A portaria (ministerial order) published in the Diário da República on Friday cuts the extraordinary rebate on the Imposto sobre os Produtos Petrolíferos e Energéticos (Tax on Petroleum and Energy Products) from €81.61 to €71.63 per 1,000 litres of road diesel, and from €53.98 to €51.62 on petrol, from Monday 31 August. That is a reduction of roughly one cent a litre on diesel and a quarter of a cent on petrol, and it is the mirror image of last week's widening: the rebate exists to hand back the extra VAT the state collects when fuel is expensive, so when wholesale prices fall the rebate shrinks with them. The Automóvel Club de Portugal (Automobile Club of Portugal) had forecast diesel falling 7.5 cents next week and petrol rising 1.5 cents; the government's order says it expects both to fall. On the ACP's pre-rebate numbers, diesel would reach €1.996 a litre on Monday and petrol €2.004, which would put petrol above diesel again. Brent for October delivery ended Friday down 0.43% at $89.31 a barrel, with the Strait of Hormuz still the standing risk in that price.

The Week Ahead

Lisbon reopens on Monday 31 August with the month still open and a domestic calendar that is effectively empty, so the last session of August will be settled abroad. We expect a flat to slightly firmer start: S&P's decision was the consensus one and removes an overhang without adding anything, and the index closed on Friday with breadth on its side. The stock to watch is again BCP, which has a buyback bidding for it every day, an eleven-year high behind it and roughly a penny of headroom to the sell side's consensus target.

Tuesday is the real event. Parpública delivers its report on the Air France-KLM and Lufthansa bids for TAP on 1 September, with eleven criteria framing the government's choice. The report goes to the government rather than to the market, so what trades on it will be leaks and interpretation rather than the document, but it is the point at which a privatisation that has run for two and a half years acquires a shortlist with a recommendation attached.

Then the rate calendar. The European Central Bank's Governing Council meets in Berlin on 9 and 10 September, and the pricing that built through last week has left it with a market expecting the deposit rate to be 55 basis points higher by March. Between now and then, every eurozone inflation print is a vote.

And one item from outside Portugal that will set the tone in technology on Monday: John Ternus takes over as chief executive of Apple on 1 September, with Tim Cook moving to chair the board after nearly fifteen years running the company. Promoting the head of hardware engineering is a statement about where Apple thinks artificial intelligence will actually live, which is in devices rather than in the cloud, and it comes while the company is visibly behind on that race and exposed on a supply chain built around China. None of that is a Lisbon story, but Apple is large enough that how Monday treats it will colour the European technology tape our own market has to trade alongside.