Odemira's Council Was Asked in July for the Licensing File on the Interior Minister's Estate, and Now It Will Not Say What It Sent

The Ministério Público (Public Prosecution Service) asked the Câmara Municipal de Odemira (Odemira Municipal Council) in July for the paperwork on the building works carried out at the Alentejo estate belonging to the family of Luís Neves, the Minister of Internal Administration. The request, reported by Correio da Manhã and carried on Friday morning by Notícias ao Minuto, sought to establish whether the work at São Teotónio was lawful and whether any licensing application or notification of works had ever been filed.

Asked this week what it had sent, the council said it had "nothing" to add. In July it had been considerably more forthcoming, confirming that Neves had submitted no licensing application at all. Council technicians then inspected the property, and afterwards, at the minister's request, met a representative acting for him together with his wife and his son.

Neves has not disputed the absence of a licence. He has said the work amounted to "interventions of little impact on the existing structure" and that "if anything has to be regularised, it will be". The builder was Construbarcelos, owned by João Carvalho, a firm that signed 17 public contracts with the Polícia Judiciária (Judicial Police) worth 2.3 million euros during the eight years Neves ran the force. The minister says he did not favour Carvalho or the company and took no benefit from the awards. The European Public Prosecutor's Office opened a verification process into those contracts on 4 August.

The trailer, and a figure that moved

A second thread tightened on Friday. Neves has explained his decision to hand a trailer seized in the drug-trafficking Operação Pacoba back to Carvalho by pointing to a quote of roughly 150,000 euros he had received for destroying the chemicals it held. The Justice Minister, Rita Alarcão Júdice, said on Friday that the 144,000 euros the Judicial Police had sought for chemical destruction covered more cases than the trailer alone.

She declined to call that a contradiction. "I am not going to comment on the statements of my colleague, Dr Luís Neves, I would not do that," she told reporters. "What I can say, what falls to me, is to supply the information I gathered, and that is what I did." Her ministry expects the Inspeção-Geral dos Serviços de Justiça (Inspectorate-General of Justice Services) audit of the Judicial Police, ordered on 6 August and covering the Neves years, to report by the end of the year. The criminal inquiry into the trailer opened on 7 July and has since widened to take in suspected abuse of power.

Tuesday

All of it now runs into a parliamentary deadline. The motion of censure Chega tabled on 2 September, whose stated ground is that Luís Montenegro has not dismissed his interior minister, will be debated and voted at three o'clock on Tuesday 8 September. Speaker José Pedro Aguiar-Branco had proposed 10 or 17 September; the parties agreed to bring it forward, shortening the periods set out in the standing orders. Because parliament is outside its ordinary sitting period, the Comissão Permanente (Standing Committee) meets on Monday to convene the plenary, and the debate will be the first censure motion ever taken outside that period.

The arithmetic has not changed since the motion was filed. It needs 116 votes and the PS is not offering them, so the likeliest outcome on Tuesday is a defeat followed by Chega's committee of inquiry into Neves's years at the Judicial Police, which Aguiar-Branco has said he will not admit in its current form unless its grounds and scope are rewritten. In the meantime the file that started it all sits, unanswered in public, in a council office in the Alentejo, where the question is the narrow one of whether a minister needed planning permission and did not ask for it. It was that Odemira property that first drew the inquiry in July.

Feature image: the parish church of São Teotónio, Odemira. Photograph by Monih, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.