The president of the Assembly of the Republic, José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, announced that he will reject the admission of the Chega party's request to establish an inquiry commission on Minister Luís Neves's actions at the Judicial Police, if the party does not amend the grounds and object of the request. This decision is set out in a dispatch to which the Lus news agency had access, in which Aguiar-Branco identifies "insufficiencies in the delimitation of the object and grounds" that do not allow determining the mandatory establishment of the commission in its current formulation.
The dispatch requests the Chega parliamentary group to reformulate the object and grounds of the request, addressing the identified insufficiencies. Aguiar-Branco considers that the reference to "Luís Neves's intervention as director of the PJ during all his terms (2018-2026)" is too generic and should identify specific acts, decisions, procedures, or matters to be investigated, and the commission cannot be empowered to scrutinize all the functional activity of a person over approximately eight years.
Regarding the company ConstruBarcelos Lda, Aguiar-Branco states that the specific contracts and procedures whose analysis is sought must be delimited. He also argues that the hiring of the company for Luís Neves's personal purposes should be redirected to its potential impact on the impartiality, transparency, or regularity of the PJ's administrative procedures, and should not be treated as an autonomous object of investigation into the private sphere of the former national director.
The president of Parliament also warns that the merit or appropriateness of decisions made by the Public Prosecutor's Office or judicial authorities within the scope of Operation Influencer cannot be assessed, nor can conduct that is strictly personal with criminal relevance be investigated as an autonomous object of parliamentary inquiry. If the request is admitted, it is considered consummated in the second legislative session, preventing Chega from requesting another mandatory parliamentary inquiry commission in that session.
