Paulo Macedo Calls Time on Politician-Indexed Public-Manager Pay at the ACEGE Lunch-Debate — CGD Chief Frames the Talent-Retention Trap Inside a €6,000 Cap Tied to the Prime Minister's Base Salary

Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) chief executive Paulo Macedo reopened a long-running governance debate inside the Administração Pública (Public Administration) on Thursday by arguing — at a Lisbon lunch-debate hosted by the Associação Cristã de Empresários e Gestores (Christian Association of Business Executives, ACEGE) — that senior public-manager pay needs to be statutorily decoupled from politicians' salaries before Portugal can plausibly demand a better-run state. "Tem de se desindexar estas remunerações das dos políticos" (these salaries must be de-indexed from those of politicians), Macedo told the room, framing the indexation chain as the single largest structural block on recruiting and retaining senior talent inside the state.

The arithmetic that anchors the Macedo argument runs as follows. The Estatuto do Pessoal Dirigente (Senior Civil Servant Statute) pegs the upper end of director-general and equivalent posts at roughly €6,000 in monthly base remuneration, the cap tied by formula to the Primeiro-Ministro (Prime Minister) base salary — itself a politically toxic line to raise. The Macedo read is that the cap squeezes the entire senior career grid downward by indexation, leaving the public sector unable to bid against private-sector salaries for the same scarce talent in fiscal policy, digital governance, energy regulation and procurement law. CGD itself sits outside the cap as a setor empresarial competitivo (competitive corporate-sector) carve-out; Macedo earned €433,000 in fixed compensation in 2025 and €964,000 once variable pay is added — a market reference that itself sits well below the four other large-cap Portuguese bank chiefs.

To pull the abstract argument into a concrete vignette Macedo drew on his earlier run as director-general of the AT (Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Tax and Customs Authority), recalling that he had once tried to promote a high-performing female deputy to a director-level role and the candidate had declined the offer because the promotion carried no salary increase — the ceiling above her grade was already saturated. "Quando dizemos mal da Administração Pública temos de saber se estamos disponíveis para pagar mais aos dirigentes" (when we badmouth the Public Administration we have to be willing to pay its managers more), he told the ACEGE audience, turning the personnel-policy point into a political one.

The broader Macedo prescription has three planks. The first is the statutory de-indexation itself — a legislative carve-out of the senior civil-service pay scale from the Primeiro-Ministro reference line, replaced by an independent benchmark against private-sector and competitor-state functional equivalents. The second is a meaningful variable-pay component tied to operational targets, the kind of incentive layer that the Sociedades Anónimas (Joint-Stock Companies) of the state-owned enterprise perimeter already run but the core ministry grid does not. The third is a faster promotion mechanic, with bonus authorisations that do not need to clear the multi-month Direção-Geral da Administração e do Emprego Público (Directorate-General of Administration and Public Employment, DGAEP) review cycle that today stalls performance-pay decisions inside individual ministries.

The political pickup will be the question. Decoupling senior civil-service pay from politicians' salaries is technically achievable inside an Orçamento do Estado (State Budget, OE) amendment, but raising the senior-management envelope without simultaneously moving the politician line is the kind of optics fight that has historically derailed equivalent attempts under Passos Coelho, António Costa and Luís Montenegro. With Helena Borges's AT and Mário Centeno's outgoing Bank of Portugal team both publicly losing senior staff to private practice through 2025, the Macedo intervention reframes a salary debate as a state-capacity one.