Portugal's Trade and Investment Agency Gets Its Fourth President in Three Years, and Two of the Departures Cost It Compensation

The Council of Ministers approved a resolution on Wednesday naming Ana Casaca as president of the board of AICEP, the Agência para o Investimento e Comércio Externo de Portugal. She is the fourth person to hold the post in a little over three years, and the third named by a government led by Luís Montenegro.

Ana Paula Lopes Borges Ferreira Casaca is currently innovation director at Galp Energia. Her appointment follows a favourable opinion from CReSAP, the public administration recruitment and selection commission, which is the required step for these designations. At the end of last year she was named to the board of the European Innovation Council, the European Union's programme for disruptive innovation and deep tech under Horizonte Europa, and was the only Portuguese member. She has more than twenty years in technology transfer, corporate innovation and ecosystem development, and began her career as a researcher in San Francisco on grants from AICEP itself and from Fulbright. She holds a degree in microbiology from Universidade Católica Portuguesa and an MBA from Porto Business School, where she teaches as an invited professor, as she does at ISEG, and attended the International Directors Programme at INSEAD. She becomes the second woman to lead the agency.

The Succession

She replaces Madalena Oliveira e Silva, who ends her mandate at the close of this year and retires immediately afterwards. Madalena Oliveira e Silva was already on AICEP's executive board when she took the presidency in June 2025, in what was described at the time as a transitional solution to keep the agency running.

That vacancy arose because Ricardo Arroja was removed. He had been chosen by Pedro Reis, economy minister in the first Montenegro government, and completed a year in the job on 6 June 2025. On 20 June he was told he was leaving, and the decision took effect on 23 June, announced by the Minister of the Presidency after a Council of Ministers. The Ministry of Economy, by then under Manuel Castro Almeida, said it wanted to impress a new dynamic on the agency's services and a profile closer to companies, able to speed up support processes, while acknowledging the outgoing president's technical competence. Arroja has disputed the criticism.

Arroja himself arrived by the same route. On 3 June 2024 the first Montenegro government dissolved the board led by Filipe Santos Costa, who had taken over on 5 June 2023 under the previous government and whose team was appointed for a 2023 to 2025 mandate. The exoneration order recorded 4 June as the departure date, one day short of a year in post and therefore, on the government's reading, outside the compensation entitlement in the public manager statute.

The Timing Problem

That reading did not hold. CReSAP's own record shows the government only submitted the assessment request for the incoming board on 3 June 2024, and its technical committee approved the opinion on Ricardo Arroja unanimously on 6 June. Since the opinion is a precondition for the appointment, the outgoing team's mandate had run past the twelve-month mark. Filipe Santos Costa received 20,000 euros, paid in June this year, and told ECO he was entitled to it by government incompetence.

Both changes were justified in near-identical language. In 2024 the Ministry of Economy said it wanted to reinforce economic diplomacy and the links between the agency, Portuguese embassies, the chambers of commerce network and the Conselho da Diáspora. In 2025 it said it wanted a more active, agile and present agency.

AICEP contracts state support for inward investment and runs Portugal's export promotion abroad. Arroja put contracted support at more than 300 million euros of total investment in the first four months of 2025, against about 420 million across the whole of 2024. The agency's remit sits alongside the export credit agency that left private hands this month.