The new law that seeks to prevent the prescription of infringement procedures of the pending competition rules in the courts, to avoid what happened in the case of the ‘bank cartel’, enters into force on Wednesday.
© Lusa
17/08/2026
by
Lusa
O diploma – Law No 51/2026 of 17 August – was published today in Diário da República, ensuring that the competition law, in the version in force since 2022, applies to cases pending at the date of entry into force of the new legislation, on Tuesday, 18 August 2026.
The law contains only one article, in which it reads that “Law No 17/2022 of 17 August transposing Directive (EU) 2019/1 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 December 2018 which aims to empower the competition authorities of the Member States to apply the law more effectively and to ensure the smooth functioning of the internal market by amending the legal regime of competition, approved by Law No 19/2012 of 8 May 2018, and the statutes of the Competition Authority, shall apply to cases pending on the date of its entry into force”.
The legislation seeks to ensure that older and still being tried in the courts does not prescribe, ensuring that the rules for counting the limitation period that applied to them are those laid down in the amendments to the competition law in 2022.
The new law is the result of a PCP project, which decided to move forward with the initiative after the outcome of the process known as the ‘bank cartel’, in which more than a dozen banks were convicted in the first instance, by the Competition, Regulation and Supervision Court (TCRS), for the exchange of commercial information between 2002 and 2013, but the process was considered prescribed by the Lisbon Court of Appeal (TRL).
The two courts had different understandings about the rules for counting the limitation period. The TCRS took the view that the law of 2022 applied to this case and the TRL considered that, being in question a case prior to that date, the older version was in force.
The Court of First Instance held that the referral of a question to the Court of Justice of the European Union (TJEU) to clarify a question on the application of European law interrupted the counting. The second instance considered the opposite, in a vote in which one of the three judges of the collective disagreed with the decision.
Today's law applies, evenly, the first interpretation, to which it avenged in the TCRS, which ensures the interruption of the count.
The diploma was approved in the parliament in a final vote overall on July 17, by the PCP, PS, Aquida, Livre, BE, PAN and JPP, having counted on the vote against PSD and CDS-PP, and the abstention of IL.
Before it was adopted in the overall final vote, the initiative was initially rejected in a first special vote in the Committee on Economics and Territorial Cohesion on 15 July, but the Communist bench submitted a request for the diploma to be voted on in plenary, where it was finally approved.
The Aço also presented an initiative, which was failed in the specialty.
When the diploma was adopted in the overall final vote on 17 July, the Competition Authority (AdC) considered that the amendment could “clarify the applicable legal framework for the limitation” of pending cases, although the regulator always argued that “the current prescription regime was applicable” to cases that are still to be decided in the courts.
“ The adoption of this legislative amendment may, however, clarify the applicable legal framework for limitation, strengthening legal certainty and predictability in law enforcement,” said AdC in response to a request for comment from Lusa.