Portugal's €3 Million Tender to Keep Newspapers Reaching the Interior Ranks the Monopolist First in Both Lots, and the Loser Is Contesting a House in Monchique
Only two companies bid. VASP has held the market alone since 2017 and two regulators call it a monopoly. The preliminary report puts it first in both lots at €763,000 a year, and Pergaminhoflash says the winning sales-point count includes a dwelling house, a fire brigade and twelve CTT branches.
The Portuguese state spent this summer building a mechanism to stop newspapers disappearing from the interior. Its own jury has now provisionally handed the whole job to the company that already holds the market alone, and the losing bidder is asking that jury to go and look at a house in Monchique.
Launched on 2 June under the Plano de Ação para a Comunicação Social (Action Plan for the Media), the tender commits about a million euros a year for three years to keep printed newspapers arriving daily in 96 municipalities where the round is thin or loss making. It runs in two lots: North and Centre at a base price of €1.7 million, and everything from the Oeste and Tagus Valley south at €1.3 million. The winner takes on a public service obligation, guarantees a sales point in every mainland council and carries rival titles without discrimination.
Two bidders, and one of them is the market
Only two companies entered. VASP has distributed Portugal's newspapers on its own since 2017, when Distrinews went insolvent, and has been wholly owned by Marco Galinha since 2024; decisions of the Autoridade da Concorrência (Competition Authority) and the Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social (media regulator) describe it as holding a monopoly position on a 100 percent market share. Pergaminhoflash was created in June specifically to bid, by José Manuel Rogeira de Jesus, majority shareholder in the owner of Jornal de Notícias and O Jogo. It is run by Rui Marques dos Santos, VASP's operations director from 2001 to 2024.
The preliminary report landed on 20 August. It ranks VASP first in both lots at €763,000 a year, roughly €2.3 million across three years, about a quarter below the base price and far below the €3.5 million a year the government had penciled in during 2024 on figures the incumbent itself supplied. Preparing the procedure was "especially complex", the government has since said, because there was one incumbent and because of serious problems in the information that operator shared, which it later acknowledged.
What the challenge alleges
Pergaminhoflash has exercised its right to be heard, and the argument is unusually concrete. Both bidders scored the maximum on geographic dispersion, so the entire 5.47-point gap sat on price. That dispersion score rests on counting five sales points in each low-density council, and Pergaminhoflash says VASP's list includes places that cannot be sales points at all: a dwelling house in Monchique, a volunteer fire brigade association in Aljezur, municipal libraries in Vila de Rei and Vila Nova de Foz Côa, and a CTT branch in Mêda alongside ten more elsewhere. The specification requires each point to open at least 300 days a year, and a weekday-only building reaches 252 at best. CTT's own published service list, it adds, offers books but not newspapers or magazines.
On price, it notes that VASP's discounts come in at exactly 30 and 20 percent off the base, to the cent, which is hard to square with a bid said to be built from the real cost structure of the operation. Rescored, it calculates, VASP falls from 65.00 points to 52.50 and one lot changes hands. There is a procedural point too: clause 13 allows one lot per bidder, and the exception that lets both go to the same company only opens because the jury proposes excluding Pergaminhoflash from Lot 2.
What this means for you
- If you live inland, this decides whether a paper arrives. Ninety-six councils are covered, and the minister responsible framed it plainly: no territory should be left in a news desert.
- Nothing is final. A final report, the definitive award and the contracts all still follow the response period.
- The cheap bid is the awkward part. The state saves about 25 percent, and the challenge is that the saving rests on a price nobody has been asked to justify.
- Print distribution is fragile. Late last year VASP warned it might stop serving eight districts outright, and CTT's own first-half profit fell 41.6 percent.
A tender written to introduce a second distributor has, on its first pass, produced one. The jury now has to decide whether five sales points in a low-density council are a fact it checked or a number it was given.
