The Head of Portugal's National Firefighters School Quit in a Seventeen-Page Letter Accusing the Firefighters League President of Blackmail
Lidio Lopes stands down from 1 October, two years short of his term. He names Antonio Nunes, describes a threat to create a Superior Firefighters Academy inside the school, and puts more than a million euros of wasted ANEPC training money on the record.
The man responsible for training every firefighter in Portugal resigned on Tuesday in a seventeen-page letter that names the president of the Liga dos Bombeiros Portugueses and accuses him of threats and blackmail.
Lídio Lopes has led the Escola Nacional de Bombeiros since July 2024, appointed by the then Interior Minister Margarida Blasco to a three-year term that should have run to July 2027. In a letter to the president of the ENB general assembly, seen by Lusa, he stands down with effect from 1 October, saying he is unable to continue because "from now on there will not be the tranquility, the predictability and the stability necessary for the exercise of a function that, by its characteristics, has very special contours".
"Not everything goes"
The letter is unusually direct about why. Lopes writes that he resisted for as long as he could: "We resisted so much, we were so conditioned and pressured, we overcame so much, up to a moment when, faced with a serious threat and because not everything goes, in the name of honour and dignity, I have to decide, and that is what I am doing."
He says he was confronted with "a threat and blackmail of dismissal of the ENB board on the part of the president of the LBP", which he calls unacceptable and intolerable. He accuses António Nunes of crossing "the red line of the unacceptable" by threatening the school's board with the creation of a Superior Firefighters Academy inside the ENB itself. The Liga has been pressing for a degree-level route into command since at least July.
The second charge in the letter is directed at both of the school's members. Lopes describes "a permanent interference, which has now become absolutely unacceptable, in the current management of the matters that fall to the ENB, on the part of the current president of the LBP, with the complacent passivity of the associate ANEPC".
The training money
Lopes also puts a number on what he calls the civil protection authority's "crass errors": more than 315,000 euros of training money wasted last year and almost 700,000 euros this year, with thousands of firefighters left without training as a result. He says he leaves "with the calm of someone whose conscience tells him he did everything".
The ENB is not a state body. It is a private non-profit association of public utility, and it has exactly two members: the Autoridade Nacional de Emergência e Proteção Civil and the Liga dos Bombeiros Portugueses. It is the pedagogical authority responsible for the technical training and qualification of every firefighter in the country, which is why a governance quarrel between its two owners is not an internal matter.
The Liga's answer
The Liga dos Bombeiros Portugueses replied the same day on social media, criticising not the substance but the staging. The way Lopes resigned, "interrupting the mandate, and the use of the ENB's own space to circulate a letter, without having spoken beforehand with the representatives of the ENB's members, says a great deal about his character and about the way he treats the institutions that voted in favour of the proposal to appoint him".
"The proper place to present a resignation letter is the general assembly and not the public space," the Liga wrote, adding that it would continue to defend firefighters "without any personal interest of any of its members". It said the school will carry on training and that the ENB "will quickly have a board deeply concerned with firefighter training again".
Lopes has said he is willing to stay in post until 30 September to keep the institution running. António Nunes was re-elected to lead the Liga in November 2025.
