Prosecutors Seek to Remove Two Valongo Mayors From Office Over a Landfill Road Ban

Prosecutors want two mayors of Valongo, north-east of Porto, convicted of abuse of power and stripped of the offices they hold — an unusually direct attempt to remove elected officials over a decision that throttled access to a private landfill. At the closing session of the trial, the Public Prosecutor's Office (Ministério Público) asked the Valongo court to find the municipality's current mayor, Paulo Esteves Ferreira, and his predecessor, José Manuel Ribeiro, guilty of the crime of abuse of power (abuso de poder), impose suspended prison sentences and, crucially, order the loss of their mandates.

At the heart of the case is a 2020 decision to ban heavy-goods vehicles from Municipal Road 606 (Estrada Municipal 606), the only route serving the Sobrado landfill (aterro de Sobrado). Prosecutors argue the restriction was not a genuine traffic-safety measure but a deliberate manoeuvre to force the site's closure by cutting off the trucks it depended on. The two operators affected, Retria and Recivalongo, reported losses exceeding €1.5 million over the roughly three months the ban was in force.

Intent is the battleground

For the prosecution, the defendants acted knowing the harm they would cause and intending to inflict it — the mental element that turns an administrative choice into the crime of abuse of power. The defence sees it very differently. Lawyers for the two men asked for acquittal, citing what they called a lack of documentary evidence and arguing that the road closure was intended to protect the local population from the landfill's effects, not to damage the companies operating it.

The clash goes to a recurring tension in Portuguese local government, where mayors wield broad powers over roads, licensing and land use, and where the line between robust environmental politics and unlawful targeting of a business can be genuinely hard to draw. Sobrado's landfill had long been a source of friction with nearby residents, giving the council a plausible public-interest motive — but also, prosecutors contend, cover for an outcome it wanted for other reasons.

What This Means for Residents

• Loss of mandate is on the table. If the court agrees with prosecutors, a sitting mayor could be removed from office, not merely fined — a rare and consequential outcome in Portuguese local politics.
• Municipal decisions carry legal risk. The case shows that council measures over roads and land use can be prosecuted as abuse of power when intent to harm is alleged.
• The timing matters. With autumn local elections approaching nationwide, a conviction touching Valongo's leadership would land in a charged political season.

The court is due to read its verdict on 10 September, weeks before Portugal's local elections. Until then, both men remain in place, and the outcome will be watched well beyond Valongo — as a test of how far the criminal law reaches into the everyday decisions of Portugal's town halls.