Portugal's Interior Minister Heads to a Court of Auditors Trial Over His Judicial Police Years

Luís Neves, Portugal's Minister of Internal Administration (Ministro da Administração Interna) and until last year the National Director of the Judicial Police (Diretor Nacional da Polícia Judiciária), is heading for trial before the Court of Auditors (Tribunal de Contas) over the way the police force managed its money during his tenure. Having chosen to contest the auditors' findings rather than accept the minimum sanctions requested by the public prosecutor, Neves will now have the case decided by a Court of Auditors judge — even as he insists in public that "I am absolutely calm" and, pointedly, that "I will not be tried."

The dispute stems from an audit of the Judicial Police's 2023 accounts, the year Neves ran the force. The Court of Auditors issued a verdict of "favourable with reservations," listing eleven aspects of the police's financial management that troubled it. At the centre are two contracts signed in 2023 — one for fuel with the energy company Petrogal, another for travel with the agency Clube Viajar — that the auditors say did not respect public-procurement rules. In one instance, trips were paid for without the supplier ever issuing an invoice. Neves argues the spending shielded an urgent, confidential operation against transnational organised crime and saved the state money; the auditors saw rules bent.

What has turned a technical audit into a political storm is a separate thread involving home renovations. A construction firm, Construbarcelos, that held roughly 3.8 million euros in refurbishment contracts at Judicial Police premises was also reported to have carried out private work on Neves's own rural estate (monte) in Odemira, and on the home of the police's financial director, Álvaro Pires, in Charneca da Caparica. The firm's owner, João dos Santos Carvalho, is described as a friend of the minister. The overlap — public contracts and private favours involving the same contractor — is now the subject of criminal interest and parliamentary demands.

The government has moved to contain the damage. The Minister of Justice (Ministra da Justiça), Rita Alarcão Júdice, has ordered an audit of the Judicial Police by the General Inspectorate of Justice Services (Inspeção-Geral dos Serviços de Justiça), together with an internal assessment that will examine how the force is run. The President of the Republic (Presidente da República), António José Seguro, has publicly pressed for the audit and the criminal investigations to "produce results as quickly as possible," adding that the country must "preserve and defend the institutions of democracy."

Neves is not the only figure caught up in the Court of Auditors case: the former Deputy National Director of the Judicial Police, Maria Luísa Lambelho Proença, has also been named. The Liberal Initiative party (Iniciativa Liberal) wants Neves, the Construbarcelos owner and the police's leadership summoned before Parliament to explain themselves.

For residents, the affair is less about the euros at stake than about who guards the guardians. The Judicial Police is the country's elite criminal-investigation body, and the spectacle of its former director defending his stewardship before the state's financial court — while a friendly builder's vans turn up at ministers' homes — has handed the opposition an opening and put the government's promises of clean administration to an early test.