Presidency Office Tells ECO the Gold-Visa Programme Was Never Designed to Grant Citizenship as 500-Plus Investors Pool a Collective Lawsuit Over the Five-to-Ten-Year Nationality-Law Stretch

The Portuguese government drew a line under the gold-visa nationality argument on Tuesday morning. In written responses to ECO, an official source in the office of Minister of the Presidency António Leitão Amaro argued that the Autorização de Residência para Investimento (ARI) scheme 'nunca teve como finalidade a atribuição da nacionalidade portuguesa' — was never designed to grant Portuguese nationality. The State, the office added, 'legislou sobre autorizações de residência para investimento' — legislated on residence authorisations for investment — and any expectation that this would convert into citizenship is laid at the door of 'expectativas comerciais criadas no mercado', commercial expectations created in the market rather than promises made by the State.

What Has Triggered the Pushback

The defence is timed to a fast-moving litigation pipeline. More than 500 ARI investors — predominantly North American — are pooling a collective lawsuit against the Portuguese State after the Nationality Law revision stretched the residency clock from five to ten years. The new threshold catches a cohort that filed €500,000-plus qualifying investments in the second half of the previous decade on the explicit understanding that five years of legal residence would put a Portuguese passport within reach.

The maths investors signed up to have shifted twice. The 14-day minimum physical presence per two-year cycle remains, but the ARI count for nationality has been re-anchored from authorisation date to the date of the first AIMA biometric appointment — a date many holders have not yet been able to schedule. Stacked against an AIMA backlog measured in three to five years on the residence side and roughly two more years at the IRN (Civil Registry) on the nationality side, the worst-case timeline from investment cheque to passport now reaches fifteen years.

The Government's Legal Framing

The Presidency Office's position is consistent with what ministers have argued in parliament: the ARI is a residence permit, not a nationality contract, and the legislator retains sovereign discretion to set citizenship rules. Lawyers acting for the collective claim will counter on three fronts — legitimate expectations (confiança legítima) under administrative law, non-retroactivity of the new ten-year rule for investments executed under the old regime, and damages tied to the AIMA processing failure that froze residence renewals and stopped the five-year clock from starting at all for thousands of files.

What This Means for Expats

• If you hold an ARI granted before the nationality reform, the government's written position confirms there will be no transitional regime coming from the Presidency to ring-fence the five-year rule. Plan for ten years from your first AIMA biometric appointment, not from your investment date.
• If you are mid-investment in a qualifying fund, real-estate alternative or job-creation route, the citizenship pathway is now a fifteen-year worst-case scenario and a ten-year baseline. Re-price the investment accordingly — the residence right, family reunification and freedom of movement inside Schengen still hold, but the nationality option carries a different time-value.
• If your file is stuck at AIMA, the Presidency Office's framing — that the State legislated only on residence — strengthens the case for filing administrative-court actions to force biometric scheduling and start the residency clock, separate from any nationality claim.
• If you are watching the collective lawsuit, the next test is whether the courts accept that pre-reform ARI investors had a protected legitimate expectation. A win there opens the door to either a transitional regime or compensation; a loss locks in the ten-year regime as the universal benchmark.