Portugal in the register

Rules and sources

Disclosure threshold

No donor register; donations only from identified natural persons, cap 25 IAS per donor per year

Legal framework

Main statute: Lei n.º 19/2003 (financing of political parties and election campaigns), together with Lei Orgânica 2/2005, which established the Entidade das Contas e Financiamentos Políticos (ECFP – Political Accounts and Financing Authority) within the Tribunal Constitucional (Constitutional Court). Donations may only come from identified natural persons, through traceable means, with an annual cap of 25 IAS (social support index) per donor; donations from legal persons are prohibited. Parties submit their annual accounts (including the list of donations) to the ECFP by May; the ECFP publishes them on the Constitutional Court website and in the Diário da República, 2nd series, and rules on their regularity through acórdãos (judgments). Since 2026, following an opinion by the CADA (access-to-documents commission) based on the GDPR, the ECFP no longer discloses donor names: only the list of amounts is accessible, without identities. Public funding: an annual subsidy of 1/135 IAS per vote for parties with more than 50,000 votes, subsidies for parliamentary groups and a campaign subsidy, calculated by the Assembleia da República and supervised by the ECFP. Lobbying: Lei 5-A/2026 creates the Registo de Transparência da Representação de Interesses (RTRI – Transparency Register of Interest Representation) at the Assembleia da República, in force from July 2026 but not yet operational.

Currency

EUR

Sources

• ECFP audit reports and decisions on election campaign accounts: donation maps and flagged donations reproduced in the reportsEntidade das Contas e Financiamentos Políticos (ECFP) - Tribunal Constitucional · presidential elections 2016 (Sampaio da Nóvoa, Paulo de Morais) and 2021 (Ana Gomes, André Ventura, Vitorino Silva); other elections not yet extracted · 730 rows
• ECFP audit reports and decisions on the annual accounts of political parties: donation lists and flagged donations reproduced in the reportsEntidade das Contas e Financiamentos Políticos (ECFP) - Tribunal Constitucional · party annual accounts 2015 (small parties: full donation lists in the annexes; larger parties only where the report names a donor) · 72 rows
• ECFP - Financiamento Partidário: annual accounts, lists of actions and means, ECFP audit reports and decisions (per party, per year)Entidade das Contas e Financiamentos Políticos (ECFP) - Tribunal Constitucional · financial years 2004-2025 (index pages and document inventory only; no rows: see the two ECFP report sources below)

Caveats

• Portugal has no public register of political donors. Neither the annual accounts of the parties nor the campaign accounts published by the ECFP include a donor list (the donations map is not published), and since 2026 the ECFP releases donations without donor identities (CADA / GDPR opinion). The only named donations come from the ECFP audit reports and decisions, which reproduce a donation list in an annex or a table, or list the donations the ECFP flags (donor not identifiable from the bank statement, cash, above the annual cap, received after the last day of the campaign, in kind, lent goods). The rows are therefore a partial, non-uniform sample: an absent donor or party does NOT mean no donations.
• Complete donation maps inside the reports: presidential campaign 2021 of Ana Gomes (Anexo IV, Mapa M3: 519 donations, EUR 31,808.21, equal to the total printed in the report) and of André Ventura (Mapa M3: 21 lines, EUR 20,040.00; one line is a cheque deposit without donor name, kept as an unnamed donor). Small parties' annual reports 2015 (MPT, PTP, PPV/CDC, JPP) reproduce the party's own donation list. Everything else is a flagged subset.
• Amounts, dates and names are as printed in the reports; honorifics (Dr., Eng.) were removed from names, tax numbers (NIF) and any address were never copied. Where a report prints the same annex both as the party's list and as the list rebuilt from receipts, only the rebuilt list is used; the report and the decision are never both used for the same table.
• Reports on the accounts of 2017 onwards (published from 2019) have the donor names blanked in the annexes that were checked (PTP and PAN 2017, CDS 2017 and 2018, the loans-of-goods annexes of the local elections 2017), and many annex pages are bank-statement screenshots; no donor can be read there. The presidential reports of 2021 (published 2024-25) are the exception.
• Not yet extracted (pending): presidential 2006 and 2011 (including the long donor lists of Manuel Alegre and Fernando Nobre 2011), 2016 in-kind donors and lent goods, legislative, European, regional (Azores, Madeira) and local election reports 2005-2019, party annual reports 2004-2014 and 2016, running-text findings that name a donor, and the 239 scanned reports (local 2021, legislative 2022, party accounts 2019-2020, presidential 2021 of J. Ferreira, M. Matias and T. Mayan) that need OCR. The two OCR'd pages 21-25 of the CHEGA 2020 report are cached in the downloaded files/ocr/ but not parsed.
• Loans of goods (cedência de bens a título de empréstimo), reimbursed expenses paid by third parties ('donativos indiretos'), party contributions, membership fees and contributions of elected members are not donations in this dataset and were not extracted.
• The ECFP audit reports and decisions are not registers: a donation flagged in a report may also appear in the party's own list; report and decision of the same case were not both counted. Donors are natural persons unless the name carries a legal form (kind 'company'); the law forbids donations from legal persons.
• All ECFP documents are PDFs; the annual accounts (balance sheet + income statement) are scanned images and were not used, so the party accounts data and the public funding data are not available. No official per-party public-funding dataset was found; nothing was computed from the legal formula.
• documents_inventory.csv (every ECFP PDF by year, section and party) and extraction_log.csv (rows and sum of each parsed table against the printed total) are auxiliary files, not standard outputs.