Manuel Pinho
Manuel António Gomes de Almeida de Pinho is a former Portuguese Minister of Economy and Innovation who achieved greater notoriety after he left office for being prosecuted and convicted on multiple charges of passive corruption, tax fraud, and money laundering. In 2024 he was sentenced to 10-years in prison and a fine in the amount of 4.9 million euros that he was shown to have received while in office in secret lump sum and monthly offshore pay-offs from his longtime mentor Ricardo Espírito Santo Salgado in exchange for benefitting Salgado's Espírito Santo Financial Group that Pinho rejoined after he left office. Pinho has remained under house arrest since 2021, which was extended in April 2025 when his appeal to overturn the conviction was denied by Lisbon's First Appellate Court. As of November 2025, a subsequent appeal to Portugal's Supreme Court was pending and a complaint against the Portuguese state had been filed with the European Court of Human Rights. Manuel Pinho has admitted to improperly receiving payments offshore and evading the related taxes but has argued that those payments were owed to him and refuted the corruption charges publishing to that effect two books where he and his defense lawyer dispute the guilty verdict.
In October 2024 he was charged with a second batch of passive corruption charges, this time for having favored Portugal's EDP - Energias de Portugal electricity company with regulatory concessions deemed worth 840 million euros in exchange for EDP paying Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs to hire him as an adjunct professor paid for directly from annual earmarked EDP grants in the amount of 1.2 million euros.
The timing of this arrangement was subsequently deemed as evidence of Pinho's passive corruption in that the EDP grants were set up for Pinho personally and timed exactly to hire him after he left government. This led to Pinho's indictment in 2017, after which he stopped lecturing at Columbia but he was only formally charged, along with the top two EDP managers who approved the grants, in October 2024 after his first conviction on passive corruption charges to the benefit of Ricardo Salgado's ESFG. As of November 2025, this case had not gone to court.
As minister, Pinho's main focus was to promote renewable energies generation in Portugal and, according to himself, after being hired by Columbia University he also lectured at 6 other universities in the US, China and Australia.
He is also remembered in Portuguese popular culture for an outburst in 2009 in the Portuguese Parliament that forced his resignation and was reported by mainstream media worldwide.
Education and early career (1975–1994)
Pinho was born in Lisbon in 1954 and graduated from the Technical University of Lisbon in 1975. He obtained a Doctorat de Spécialité in economics at the Université Paris X Nanterre in 1982, which he holds as equivalent to a Ph.D. He returned to Portugal to teach at the Technical University of Lisbon and the Catholic University of Portugal; and in 1985 went to work as a staff economist at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. He returned to Portugal in 1988 to become a management-level banker at the Portuguese subsidiaries of Manufacturers Hanover and Credit Lyonnais. Between 1991 and 1994, Pinho was Director-General of the Portuguese Treasury and his tenure coincided with the second and final stage of the privatization of Banco Espírito Santo, which he joined right after he resigned from the Treasury in 1994.Espirito Santo Financial Group career (1994–2014)
Pinho was between 1994 and 2005 a top operative of Portugal's defunct Espirito Santo Financial Group. He was initially hired as the group's head of research and capital markets and quickly rose to become a full member of the executive board of Banco Espírito Santo in charge of key financial operations areas. He also quickly won the trust of one of the bank's senior shareholders and Espirito Santo family scion Ricardo Espírito Santo Salgado who would become the bank's next chairman and Pinho's mentor in his family-controlled Espirito Santo Financial Group publicly saying in 2014 that Pinho was "a good financier" and had "delivered great services." File:Ricardo Salgado.jpg|thumb|left|ESFG chairman Ricardo Salgado who became Pinho's career mentor at ESFG and secretly continued to pay Pinho while he was minister and arranged him a generous financial support package afterwards. As a result, when Pinho became minister in 2005, it was widely believed that it had been due to the influence of Salgado, who would publicly deny it a decade later. However, Salgado continued to secretly pay Pinho 14.963,94 euros per month while Pinho was minister, in addition to hiring Pinho's second wife to oversee the bank's newly started modern photography collection, thus ensuring that Pinho remained bound to the ESFG while he was minister. Against this background, some of the decisions Pinho took as minister were criticized for benefiting ESFG, such as the sale of Portugália Airlines, the SONAE Group's failed tender offer for Portugal Telecom where ESFG was the largest minority shareholder, or Pinho's dealings with EDP-Energias de Portugal that was chaired by another former ESFG top operative António Mexia. Pinho's alleged favouring of EDP-Energias de Portugal when he awarded it the 26-year hydro-electricity buying monopoly bypassing the regular public bidding procedures would subsequently be considered by the European Commission and the Portuguese Court of Audits detrimental to the interests of the Portuguese treasury and electricity consumers. In June 2017, it also became the subject of a corruption investigation by the Portuguese Judicial Police that indicted Pinho, Mexia, and Salgado.After resigning from his minister position in 2009, Pinho was rehired by the ESFG as vice chairman of its Banco Espírito Santo Africa subsidiary in what was later revealed to be a 39,000 euros a month no-show job that allowed Pinho to be away teaching in New York and elsewhere.
Pension controversy and litigation
Pinho's relationship with the ESFG soured in 2014, when he demanded early payment of his pension benefits in anticipation of the collapse of ESFG, which happened shortly afterwards. His pension withdrawal request was refused by the new management of Novo Banco, the entity that took over the ESFG, and, in 2015, Pinho sued Novo Banco and the former ESFG pension fund for 7.8 million euros consistent with his claim of a lifetime pension of 21,000 euros per month pension from age 65. In response, the Novo Banco cut his 39,000 euros per month BESA salary to 3,000 euros, which led Pinho to rescind his contract and file a second lawsuit to obtain compensation in line with the original salary amount. According to Pinho's own court depositions, when he became minister in 2005 he had asked for an early retirement package from age 55, but, since the statutory age was 65, Salgado agreed instead to give Pinho the "no-show" job until he reached the applicable age. In 2016, Pinho lost both lawsuits.Panama Papers involvement
In 2016, Pinho was first referenced in the Panama Papers leaks as having received 180,000 euros in offshore payments from a shell company for the ESFG. In 2018 it was revealed that Pinho had held at least four offshore secret bank accounts in his name, including one in Panama into which he had received 3.5 million euros in under-the-table payments from his former boss Ricardo Salgado between 2006 and 2014, including at least 778,000 euros while Pinho was government minister and bound by office not to receive income from other sources, which led to indictments in Portugal on passive corruption and influence peddling charges.Pandora Papers involvement
In 2021 the Pandora Papers investigation confirmed the existence of three of Pinho's offshore accounts and that he had used one of them to transfer funds to buy and an apartment in New York in 2010. It also revealed that his wife Alexandra Pinho was a co-title holder to those accounts.Political and ministerial career (2005–09)
Pinho entered government politics in the early 2000s when he started contributing to Portugal's opposition Socialist Party economic agenda for the 2005 legislative elections. In 2005 he was rewarded by Socialist Party President José Sócrates who allowed Manuel Pinho to run as an independent in the elections and placed him at the top of the Socialist Party list for the district of Aveiro thus ensuring his election.Following the Socialist Party's victory in the elections, Sócrates became Prime Minister and invited Pinho to be Minister of Economy and Innovation in the new government. As minister, Pinho attached priority to the full use of Portugal's existing renewable energy sources and development of new ones. During his term in office, Portugal's installed capacity for wind-powered generation tripled from 1,000 to 3,000 MW and for solar-powered it increased from virtually nothing to 60 MW. He also launched an electric car program that sought to make Portugal the first country in Europe with a nationwide charging network, but the program was scrapped shortly after Pinho left government. In 2008, Pinho promoted an experimental sea-waves powered generation station, but it failed after three months. As energy minister of a European Union member country, Pinho contributed to the European Union's first Strategic Energy Technology Plan of 2007, that served as a blueprint for European development of low-carbon energy production.However, Pinho was much criticized for his dealings with EDP-Energias de Portugal and its chairman Antonio Mexia, whom he had worked with at the ESFG. Pinho's decisions to grant high price guarantees to renewable energy generation and a 26-year hydropower buying monopoly to EDP-Energias de Portugal were deemed "excessive" by the subsequent government, "non-competitive and undervalued" by the European Commission that opened an official inquiry in 2013, and "contrary to the public interest" by the Portuguese Court of Audits in 2016.
Pinho, in a 2007 interview, described himself using the English expression "I’m the one they love to hate" referring to his critics. As Minister, he also became known for being prone to political gaffes that drew him plenty of press and social media coverage and ultimately led to his resignation.