Portugal’s high-end civil servant pensions remain eye-watering

At a point where international funds, like the IMF, have ‘urged Portugal’ to revise the way they calculate lower pensions, and benefits like widow’s/ widower pensions, because they seem overly generous, a story about judges retiring on the same monthly income as they received when they were working seems all the more remarkable.

The Bank of Portugal, and the Ministry of Labour, Solidarity and Social Solidarity, have already intimated that recommendations to revise lower pensions downwards “will be considered” (albeit not during this legislature) – yet the IMF appears to have said nothing about the high-end public sector pensions, which have been touched on today by tabloid Correio da Manhã, as the former president of the Constitutional Court prepares to receive his monthly retirement income.

“The former president of the Constitutional Court, José João Abrantes, passes into retirement next month with a pension of €7,481.84”, says the paper, having consulted the list of ‘workers connected to the State who stop being active in August’.

“José João Abrantes, 71, will not lose income, receiving the same income as when he was working” due to his benefitting from a “special regime allowed for in the profession which says ‘the net pension of a retired judicial magistrate may neither be higher nor lower than the remuneration of an active judge of the same rank’.

“In addition, the pensions of (such magistrates) are automatically updated when there are salary increases for working counterparts,” CM adds.

Perusing the list of retiring public servants, the paper found that the highest monthly pension starting next month will be going to Maria Leontina Barros Viana, who leaves her post as technical coordinator of the general secretariat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, receiving a monthly pension of €9,154.13.

Source material: Correio da Manhã

Natasha Donn

Journalist for the Portugal Resident.