Secretário-Geral Adjunto do MAI Pombeiro Hands In a Second Resignation on Friday 22 May 2026 Over the Viegas Nunes SIRESP Re-Election — Cites a 'Systematic Pattern' of Ethically Reprehensible Conduct

António Pombeiro, the secretário-geral adjunto do Ministério da Administração Interna (MAI) and coordinator of the SIRESP-replacement working group since December 2025, handed in a second resignation letter on Friday 22 May 2026 — and this one was accepted by Minister Luís Neves. ECO and RTP reported the file on Saturday 24 May. Pombeiro had already tendered a first resignation on 28 April 2026 that the Minister had not acted on; the Friday letter, filed the same day the SIRESP general assembly re-elected General Paulo Viegas Nunes to the presidency of Portugal's national emergency-communications grid, attaches what Pombeiro describes as evidências concretas of um padrão sistemático de comportamentos eticamente reprováveis e juridicamente questionáveis — "a systematic pattern of ethically reprehensible and legally questionable behaviour" — inside the previous SIRESP management cycle. Viegas Nunes is scheduled to take office on Monday 26 May.

The Two Resignations Sit Either Side of the SIRESP Vote

The chronology is the spine of the story. Pombeiro filed his first resignation on 28 April — the MAI's official line, conveyed through Minister Neves's office to Lusa, stresses this was antes de ser conhecida a eleição do general Viegas Nunes ("before the election of General Viegas Nunes was known"). The first letter sat unsigned for almost four weeks. On Friday 22 May, the SIRESP general assembly elected Viegas Nunes to a new term as president of the company — a return to the role he first held between April 2022 and the end of his 2022-2024 mandate. Pombeiro filed his second resignation the same Friday. The MAI accepted it. Within 48 hours, opposition leaders from PS, Chega and Iniciativa Liberal had filed urgent requests for parliamentary hearings of Minister Neves, Viegas Nunes and Pombeiro himself.

The Allegations — Favoritism, Conflicts of Interest, and €12,000 to a Spouse's Firm

The resignation letter, as reported by Público on Saturday, frames Pombeiro's objection in three layers. First, he accuses the previous SIRESP management team of favorecimento, conflitos de interesses e decisões 'eticamente reprováveis' — "favouritism, conflicts of interest and 'ethically reprehensible' decisions" — including an ajuste-direto contract awarded to an IT-services consultancy linked to an alleged personal contact of Viegas Nunes. Second, he cites a separate file involving Carlos Pereira Leitão — the previous coordinator of the SIRESP-replacement working group who was removed "a seu pedido" in December 2025 — who allegedly attempted to commission a services contract worth roughly €12,000 from his own wife's sole-trader firm. Third, Pombeiro tells Minister Neves he had previously flagged the pattern sem que tivesse sido desencadeada qualquer averiguação interna — "without any internal investigation being launched" — and that the Friday re-election of Viegas Nunes removed condições de normalidade e eficácia for him to continue in office.

What SIRESP Is and Why the Governance Matters

SIRESP — the Sistema Integrado de Redes de Emergência e Segurança de Portugal — is the integrated communications backbone that ties together the GNR, the PSP, the INEM ambulance service, the bombeiros volunteer and professional fire corps and the Autoridade Nacional de Emergência e Proteção Civil (ANEPC). It carries more than 35 million voice and data calls a year across an installed base of more than 40,000 user terminals. The Portuguese state acquired 100% of the company from Altice and Motorola in December 2019 for €7 million and runs it as a state-owned enterprise under the MAI's tutelage. The Tribunal de Contas has tallied state spending on the network at more than €700 million since 2016; current modernisation work is budgeted at roughly €36 million through 2027; and the operations-and-maintenance umbrella tender awarded in March 2023 to Altice Labs, Motorola, NOS, Moreme, Omtel and No Limits carries a five-year envelope of €75 million. The network has been failing under operational stress for years — the 17-20 June 2017 Pedrógão Grande fire cluster recorded SIRESP antennas disconnected and the network leaning on tecnologia ultrapassada; the 28-29 April 2025 Iberian apagão pushed the network to quebra total in the early hours of the second day when the satellite redundancy also failed. The 2022 ajuste-direto-contract file that drew Polícia Judiciária searches at the MAI's Secretaria-Geral, four firms and three residences in October that year remains in the background of tonight's story.

The Opposition Response — Hearings Demanded, Parliamentary Inquiry Hinted

The Sunday reactions read as a coordinated push for parliamentary scrutiny. José Luís Carneiro — PS leader and a former MAI minister — used a Sunday press appearance to frame the file as a governance failure on two distinct tracks. The first track is the two-year vacancy in the SIRESP presidency between the end of Viegas Nunes's 2024 mandate and the Friday 22 May 2026 election. Durante dois anos, a mais importante infraestrutura de comunicação do Estado esteve sem presidente e qual foi a notícia que soubemos ontem: o Governo foi buscar ao fim de dois anos o general Viegas Nunes para voltar a assumir a presidência, Carneiro told reporters — "For two years the country's most important communications infrastructure was without a president, and what was the news we got yesterday? The Government, at the end of two years, went to find General Viegas Nunes to take the presidency again." The second track is the substance of Pombeiro's allegations: Carneiro said the Government prejudicou o interesse estratégico e crítico do país. André Ventura — Chega's leader — asked whether the reappointment is um prémio à incompetência ou à corrupção ("a prize for incompetence or for corruption") and attacked what he described as the silêncio ensurdecedor do PS on the file's older chapters. Rui Rocha — Iniciativa Liberal's leader — called the allegations extremamente graves and filed a formal request through the Comissão de Assuntos Constitucionais for the three principal figures to be heard in parliament. The MAI's only on-the-record reply, conveyed by Minister Neves's office, is that compete ao próprio secretário-geral adjunto, agora demissionário, pronunciar-se sobre os mesmos, não cabendo ao Ministério da Administração Interna elencá-los ou comentá-los — "it falls to the resigning Secretary-General Adjoint himself to articulate his motives; it does not fall to the Ministry of the Interior to list them or comment on them."

Who Viegas Nunes Is

General Paulo Viegas Nunes is an army officer with a Military Sciences degree from the Academia Militar, an Electrical and Computer Engineering background from Instituto Superior Técnico and a doctorate in Information Sciences from Universidad Complutense in Madrid. He spent most of his career in the Army's Communications and Information Systems directorate and on UN, EU and NATO missions in communications, cybersecurity and cyberdefence. He was named to the SIRESP presidency on 5 April 2022 by the second Costa government — a Council of Ministers nomination communicated through the prime minister's office — and finished his first three-year mandate in 2024. The Friday 22 May 2026 SIRESP general assembly vote returns him to the chair after a roughly two-year vacancy at the top of the company. Viegas Nunes had not commented publicly on the Pombeiro letter by Sunday evening.

Why the Network Replacement Is the Subtext

The operational reason Pombeiro's portfolio was attached to SIRESP in the first place is that the network is approaching the end of its current technology lifecycle. The internal working group he took over from Carlos Pereira Leitão in December 2025 is meant to deliver the technical and procurement frame for a SIRESP successor — a replacement of the legacy TETRA radio backbone with a hybrid 4G/5G mission-critical-broadband architecture aligned with the European Critical Communications System (BroadEU.Net) work and with similar transitions under way in Spain (RESCAT successor), France (Réseau Radio du Futur) and the United Kingdom (Emergency Services Network). The original working-group deadline was overshooting January 2026 even before Friday's events. Pombeiro's exit removes the working group's coordinator at the exact moment Viegas Nunes returns to the SIRESP chair — meaning the technical specification of a successor network and the operational governance of the legacy network are again concentrated in the same office and personality, which is precisely the structural overlap that drew the original 2022 PJ searches.

What This Means for Expats

If you live in a fire-prone Centro or Algarve parish: SIRESP is the network the bombeiros use to coordinate the fire-truck and water-bomber tasking that protects your dwelling perimeter, and an under-modernised network has, in past fire seasons, generated coordination gaps that contributed to civilian casualties. The Pombeiro file does not change the network's day-to-day performance for the 2026 fire season — the modernisation runway runs through 2027 — but it does raise the political-supervision risk on the file at the exact moment INE has placed 30.6% of mainland Portugal in the high or very-high rural-fire-hazard band.
If you have called 112 in Portugal — or expect to: the 112 line is operated by the PSP and routed into SIRESP for the inter-agency dispatch. A SIRESP outage of the kind seen on the 28-29 April 2025 apagão pushed parts of the country onto fallback radio and mobile-handset coordination, with measurable response-time degradation. A pre-summer political shock at the top of the company does not change your individual emergency-call experience tonight, but it does feed into the operational-resilience question that the BdP-led national-payment-resilience plan is also addressing on the financial-sector side.
If you follow Portuguese politics: the parliamentary track will move through the Comissão de Assuntos Constitucionais, Direitos, Liberdades e Garantias, where IL's formal request for urgent hearings has now been filed. A comissão de inquérito (full parliamentary inquiry) has not been announced and would need PS or Chega to table the motion. The Ministério Público has not been formally seized; Pombeiro's reference to evidências concretas of comportamentos juridicamente questionáveis, sitting on top of the 2022 PJ file, sets up the possibility that the MP opens a parallel criminal track in the coming weeks.
If you are a sector counterparty: the six firms inside the 2023 O&M umbrella — Altice Labs, Motorola, NOS, Moreme, Omtel, No Limits — should expect a procurement-disclosure squeeze through the second half of 2026, and the successor-network architecture work should expect a procedural pause while the working group reconstitutes itself under a new coordinator.

The MAI Sunday line — that only Pombeiro can articulate his own motives, and that the Ministry will not list them — is unusually thin for a file that has already moved from internal grievance to opposition-led parliamentary push. The next pressure point is Viegas Nunes's Monday 26 May inauguration; the second is the first Comissão de Assuntos Constitucionais sitting that takes IL's request; the third is whether any of the 2022-2024 ajuste-direto and €12,000 spouse-firm files surface a formal IGAI inspection or MP referral. The Pombeiro letter has already shifted the SIRESP file from a slow-burn technology-procurement story to the political file of the week for the Ministério da Administração Interna.