Muddy Waters Drags Mota-Engil Into a Texas Civil-Defamation Action Over Carlos Mota Santos's December 2024 Expresso Interview — Group Frames the 19 December 2025 Filing as Carrying 'Little Relevance' to Operations

The Lisbon-listed engineering and construction group Mota-Engil confirmed on Tuesday 20 May 2026 that it is the defendant in a civil-defamation action brought by the US short-selling fund Muddy Waters Capital LLC in a Texas state court, filed on 19 December 2025. The suit targets statements made by Mota-Engil chief executive Carlos Mota Santos during a December 2024 interview with the Lisbon weekly Expresso, in which the CEO is alleged to have mis-characterised the structure of the short positions the fund had built against Mota-Engil shares. CFO José Carlos Nogueira confirmed the action and read the 2025 filing as carrying 'little relevance' to the group's operations, alongside the publication of the record Q1 2026 net profit of €35 million.

The Underlying Interview

The December 2024 Expresso interview with Carlos Mota Santos covered the group's response to the Muddy Waters short-selling campaign that had pressured the share price across late 2024. Mota Santos characterised the fund's positioning in a way that Muddy Waters now argues misrepresented the structure of the trades the fund had disclosed. The Texas filing reframes that characterisation as defamation under US state-court rules, with Muddy Waters seeking damages and a retraction. The complaint does not yet quantify the compensation sought; the dollar figure is expected to be set at the discovery stage.

Mota-Engil's Procedural Response

The Lisbon group has filed for the immediate dismissal of the action and contests the venue, the substance and the underlying interpretive frame. José Carlos Nogueira told investors the company has 'conviction and confidence that the outcome can only be a favourable decision for Mota-Engil', adding that the group 'trusts in national and international justice' and expects the case to conclude quickly. The dismissal motion is the standard first procedural step in a Texas civil-defamation matter and is decided ahead of the discovery and merits phases.

Muddy Waters and Mota-Engil — The Short-Selling File

Muddy Waters Capital LLC, founded by Carson Block, is one of the better-known activist short funds in the global equity market, with a multi-year track record of public campaigns against Asian and European listed industrials. The fund disclosed a short position against Mota-Engil across 2024, citing concerns about accounting treatment of certain Latin American and African contracts. The Lisbon group rejected the underlying analysis and Mota Santos pushed back publicly. The cycle of short-disclosure, company response and counter-rebuttal across 2024 forms the backdrop against which the December 2024 Expresso interview — now the basis for the Texas action — was published.

The Bond-Prospectus Disclosure

The Texas action is flagged inside the €110 million retail-bond prospectus that closed on 14 May 2026 at a 4.6% five-year coupon as one of the legal-risk items disclosed to bondholders. The placement still drew demand of €155 million from 4,800 retail investors, forcing the offering size to be doubled — confirmation that the bondholder base did not read the legal-risk disclosure as material to the group's credit profile. The bond prospectus does not quantify the potential damages exposure, consistent with the Texas filing's own deferred-quantification structure.

Where the Action Sits Inside the 2026 Earnings Cycle

The litigation lands in the same quarter as the group's record Q1 net-profit print of €35 million (+31% year-on-year), a €16.9 billion carteira de encomendas equivalent to 3.6 years of activity, and the €1,255 million Santos-Guarujá underwater-tunnel PPP anchoring the Brazilian backlog. The earnings momentum and the Texas suit are now the two cleanly opposing investor-relations threads in the group's Q1-Q2 communication: the operational read carries a structural uplift in margin and pipeline visibility into 2028, while the litigation tail introduces an unquantified contingent legal-cost line on the income statement.

Texas as Venue

Muddy Waters has filed in Texas state court, a venue choice the fund's filings have not yet explained beyond the standard jurisdictional bases for a defamation action against a foreign-listed entity. Texas civil procedure carries an anti-SLAPP framework (the Texas Citizens Participation Act) that filings against media-and-public-statement defendants typically navigate at the dismissal stage. Mota-Engil's dismissal motion is expected to engage TCPA defences as well as the standard jurisdictional and substantive grounds, given that the underlying interview was published in a Portuguese-language Lisbon weekly to a Portuguese-language audience.

The PSI Read

For the Euronext Lisbon equity desks, the Tuesday-Wednesday news cycle pairs the litigation disclosure with the record Q1 print. The group's stock closed Wednesday's session up 1.54% alongside the PSI close at 9,247.99 (+0.96%), suggesting the buy-side took the operational beat over the legal-tail noise. The retail-bond cycle has already absorbed the litigation disclosure without reflux on coupon pricing, and the standard pattern in defamation-against-issuer actions tied to public statements is for the matter to take several quarters at the dismissal stage before any material disclosure update is required.

What This Means for Expats

• If you hold Mota-Engil equity or the 4.6% retail bond, the litigation disclosure sits inside the bond prospectus and the standard issuer disclosure chain. The Texas action has not yet been quantified and the group's first procedural step is the dismissal motion; the timing is multi-quarter and the operational fundamentals carry the near-term price action.
• If you advise Portuguese investors on activist-short coverage, the Muddy Waters-Mota-Engil cycle is now the cleanest case study of a Portuguese-listed defendant in a US activist-short defamation action. The dispute traces back to a Portuguese-language interview in Expresso, with the dispute jurisdiction now sitting in a Texas civil court — a jurisdictional choice that will be tested at the dismissal stage.
• If you operate in Portuguese capital-markets compliance, the prospectus disclosure pattern shows the standard route: legal-risk items quantified where possible, deferred where the underlying action has not yet set damages, and updated only when the procedural stage shifts. The Texas matter does not currently carry a quantified damages line.
• If you are a Portuguese journalist or analyst writing about short-selling campaigns, the action signals that activist short funds will now litigate over media characterisations of their disclosed positioning — a procedural shift that may shape how Portuguese-language interviews with corporate executives frame ongoing short positions.
• If you cover the Brazilian-Portuguese industrial corridor, the Mota-Engil litigation runs parallel to the Brazilian backlog buildout and the Santos-Guarujá execution; the two threads converge on the H1 2026 reporting cycle when the dismissal motion's first ruling may land alongside the half-year results.

Sources: Mota-Engil CMVM communications and Q1 2026 disclosure pack; €110 million retail-bond prospectus (May 2026); ECO (Tier 2 Portuguese-language media), 20 May 2026.