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The Portuguese State Has Almost 600 Properties Valued at Less Than €1

2 February 2019

The country’s Court of Auditors harshly criticised the Ministry of Finance and the Directorate General of Treasury and Finance (DGTF) for their lack of attention to the state’s assets and their failure to adequately assess their worth.

The State Property Inventory System had 23,598 registered real estate properties at the end of 2017. Of that total, only 24% are on the land registry and only 30% an associated asset price, which means that there are more than 16,000 state-owned buildings whose value is not known by the State itself. Among the inventoried properties, there are 583 with an equity value of less than one euro, according to the newspaper “Expresso.”

In light of the figures, the Court of Auditors (TC) harshly criticised the Ministry of Finance and the General Directorate of Treasury and Finance (DGTF) for their lack of attention to the state’s assets and their failure to adequately assess their worth.

The judges on the TC issued an opinion to the General State Account 2017 (CGE), cited by the weekly, whereby the judges noted that the State should have already completed a full inventory of publicly-owned asset at least six years ago: “A lack of an adequate inventory and valuation of the properties persists, even though it should have been completed in 2012.”

In response to the TC’s criticisms, the DGTF stated that “we are in the process of implementing a computer platform that will aim to unify and synchronise any information on state-owned assets and optimise the procedures in order to have reliable, systematised and updated information, in a fast and accessible way, enabling all the necessary reports in the scope of the management of the State’s assets.”

Original Story: Jornal Econômico

Photo: Cristina Bernardo

Translation: Richard Turner