The numbers were presented by Chega’s leader during this Thursday’s fortnightly debate. Do they correspond to the truth? SIC Verifies.
During the in Parliament, Chega’s president, André Ventura, stated that “63% of support requests” related to the 2025 fires are still unpaid, questioning the effectiveness of the Government’s response led by Luís Montenegro.
Ventura was referring to the data presented by the newspaper Expresso, in a What was the point, ifsix months after the fires that mainly affected the North and Center of the country9,303 applications had been made under the simplified support regime, which provided compensation of up to 10 thousand euros for affected farmers and companies. Of these, according to monitoring reports from the Regional Coordination and Development Commissions (CCDR) cited by Expresso, only 3,445 applications had been paid.
Estes data effectively corresponds to around 63% of orders yet to be settled. However, the numbers presented in Parliament by the Prime Minister are different: Luís Montenegro stated, further on, in response to PS secretary general José Luís Carneiro, that Of the 9,687 applications submitted, 5,713 have already been approved, and of these, 5,486 had already been paid.
These values, updated this week by the CCDR with the Governmentwere confirmed to SIC Verifica by an official source from the Ministry of Economy, who also revealed that 1,336 applications were rejected, 2,638 are still to be analyzed and that two thirds of the losses in applications that have not yet been analyzed are concentrated in five municipalities.
What support is this?
The Government created a simplified mechanism through the with the objective of ensuring quick payments without the need to present prior documentation. Still, it remained requirement for a mandatory technical inspectioncarried out by experts from local authorities or CCDR.
Without this in-person inspection, the process cannot proceed to payment.which created a significant administrative blockage, mainly due to the shortage of technicians given the scale of the catastrophe, a reason cited by Luís Montenegro to justify the 2,638 applications not yet analyzed.
SIC Verifies that it is…
It is true that, with the data he had available, André Ventura presented the correct percentage of applications for support that had not yet been paid: around 63%. However, this data was already out of date. The most recent figures released by the government show that the percentage of unpaid support has fallen, however, to around 44%.
