Lisbon, May 26, 2026 (Lusa) - The resigning deputy secretary-general of Portugal's interior ministry, Antonio Pombeiro, contradicts the interior minister's version of his first resignation request, which he justified at the time by irregularities in the emergency communications network SIRESP under the management of Viegas Nunes.
The office of Interior Minister Luís Neves issued a statement on Monday regarding the resignation of Antonio Pombeiro and the appointment of Major-General Paulo Viegas Nunes to the board of directors of SIRESP.
The office stated the deputy secretary-general first requested his resignation on 28 April, before the choice of Viegas Nunes became public, having at the time "invoked reasons different from those now at stake."
An exchange of emails between Pombeiro and members of the interior minister's office, which Lusa accessed, contradicts the minister's version.
Pombeiro requested his dismissal and made direct references to Viegas Nunes in an email sent to the interior ministry on 28 April.
The resigning deputy secretary-general, who again requested to resign on 22 May, specifically mentioned attempts to bring SIRESP closer to the armed forces and reported several situations involving Carlos Leitão, the company's former technical director.
He noted in his first resignation request, which the minister rejected, that Viegas Nunes proposed "an attempt to concentrate the management of the SIRESP network in the military sphere" during his tenure as the company's chair.
"Such an orientation could lead to a corporate decision-making model, with no clear advantages for the interior ministry. On the contrary, it would imply a dependence on the defence sector for managing the ministry's critical communications, without creating relevant operational value," he wrote in the email to the minister's chief of staff, Joana Araújo, and adviser Valentina Marcelino.
Pombeiro said this concept allowed communication only to "a very small set of network talkgroups" and demonstrated the "limited and non-structural nature of the solution."
The email explains that Viegas Nunes left in March 2024 because he needed to return to active duty in the army for promotion to major-general.
Technical director Carlos Leitão, who managed several projects funded by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP, an EU recovery fund), sought to continue bringing SIRESP closer to the army after that departure.
Pombeiro noted that the ministry later corrected this trend, ordering that SIRESP's core systems remain within the ministry's infrastructure.
He first requested his resignation following an email from adviser Valentina Marcelino, who asked him for "some adaptations for the public version" of the report conclusions by a government-created working group that the deputy secretary-general coordinated to find an alternative to SIRESP.
Marcelino sent the email on 24 April, 11 days before the report's presentation ceremony, asking Pombeiro to omit some annexes "for security reasons."
She called this "a desirable option because, in many ways, the working group did not limit itself to presenting recommendations, it even identified 'how to do it', and that removes flexibility from implementing the recommendations."
Pombeiro replied that he saw no risk or breach of security, adding that, although he refused to be treated like a "drafting intern," he complied with the request and sent a proposal aligned with the specified guidelines.
He also said that since "critical communications" fall outside Marcelino's expertise, he inferred that the issues originated from "comments that Major-General Viegas Nunes shared."
António Pombeiro attended a ceremony at the interior ministry on 5 May alongside the interior minister, Luís Neves, to present the team's findings.
The deputy secretary-general resigned from his post on Friday, alleging a series of "serious irregularities" in the management of SIRESP during the chairmanship of Viegas Nunes, who led the company between 2022 and 2024 and returned to its leadership on Monday.
He resigned the same day the government appointed Viegas Nunes to chair the company and showed "total unavailability" to continue in office, given that he "had transmitted" information about "serious irregularities" to the minister without the ministry launching any internal investigation.
The interior minister expressed "absolute confidence" in Paulo Viegas Nunes to chair the company managing SIRESP on Monday, maintaining that he is "entirely aligned" with the model to make the system robust.
"The interior minister is entirely aligned with the model Major-General Viegas Nunes defends to make SIRESP a robust communications system and increasingly less dependent on the private sector, reinforcing, whenever possible, cooperation with the armed forces," the office of Interior Minister Luís Neves stated in a note rejecting any illegalities in the network's management during Viegas Nunes's previous term.
Several controversies have followed the SIRESP communications network since its creation.
It underwent its most significant overhaul after operational failures during the 2017 wildfires and faced limitations again during the 2025 Iberia blackout and storm Kristin, which affected Portugal’s central region at the end of January.
CMP/LYT // ADB.
Lusa
