Drug-Trafficking Evidence, a Minister's Contractor and an Open PJ Inquiry

Portugal's Polícia Judiciária (PJ) has opened a formal inquiry into how a trailer seized during a major drug-trafficking investigation ended up at the premises of a private construction company. According to reporting by Sol and confirmed by ECO, a reporting team from Sol/TVI/CNN Portugal found the trailer last Saturday at the premises of Construbarcelos, a construction company owned by João dos Santos Carvalho, attached to one of the company's own trucks. Days later, the trailer was gone. After being alerted, the PJ confirmed the seizure was genuine and ordered the equipment moved to the police impound lot in Seixal, where it had reportedly been stored before disappearing at some point in 2025.

The PJ says the inquiry concerns how the trailer left police custody and ended up at a private business. No public authority has alleged that Minister Luís Neves personally authorised the transfer, and Portugal Dispatch has seen no such claim from the PJ, from Sol, or from any other outlet.

The trailer was originally seized in December 2024 during "Operação Pacoba," an investigation that led to the dismantling of one of Europe's largest cocaine-processing labs. Its original owner, Armando Caixeirinho, is described in Portuguese reporting as the alleged leader of the network broken up in that operation; he is currently a fugitive under a European Arrest Warrant. Sources linked to the PJ's national drug-trafficking unit told Sol they had wanted to detain Santos Carvalho over the discovery, alleging he was caught in the act of possessing the seized item.

The PJ's inquiry is specifically aimed at establishing how a piece of evidence seized under an active criminal case came to be in a private individual's hands. According to Sol's reporting, only the PJ's national director has the authority to approve the movement of assets seized in cases under the Public Prosecution Service's oversight. At the time the trailer was originally seized, that director was Luís Neves, who is now Portugal's Minister of Internal Administration. The question under investigation is how the transfer happened at all, not who specifically ordered it.

Why this contractor, and why now

This isn't the first headline involving Neves and Santos Carvalho this month. The relationship between the two men, and specifically the overlap between public contracts and private ones, has been under scrutiny in the Portuguese press since Sol's original report on 10 July.

Neves led the PJ for roughly eight years before taking office as Minister of Internal Administration on 23 February 2026. During his time as director, starting in 2019, the PJ began awarding renovation contracts to Construbarcelos, including work on the force's district headquarters in Guarda and Évora. According to Sol, five contracts were awarded between 2020 and 2023, some without public tender, at least two signed personally by Neves in his role as director. Construbarcelos's renovation of the PJ's Évora unit does not appear on Portal Base, the platform Portuguese state entities are legally required to use to disclose public contracts; a PJ spokesperson told reporters the omission could be linked to security considerations. Separately, the Mais Transparência portal shows just over €973,000 in PJ-Construbarcelos contracts tied specifically to EU recovery-fund financing, a figure that neither confirms nor rules out the roughly €1.9 million Sol says the company billed the PJ in total between 2020 and 2025.

Santos Carvalho had already been investigated by the PJ in 2017, over alleged document falsification and fraudulent insolvency tied to a different, unrelated hotel-sector company he owned, years before the PJ began awarding his construction firm public contracts.

From contractor to friend to home-renovation job

Neves says he first met Santos Carvalho personally in 2023, by which point around 70% of the total contract value had already been awarded, a chronology he's offered as evidence against any suggestion of favouritism. In an interview with Now, he said he "never knew this businessman" personally during the period when most of the contracts were signed, and that all PJ awards went through transparent public tender processes in which, as national director, he had no role in vetting individual bidders. He has said he would "do things differently today" given the scrutiny, but has consistently denied any preferential treatment, pointing to what he describes as dozens of other contracts the PJ signed with other companies over the same period.

In 2024, after buying rural property in São Teotónio, in the municipality of Odemira, Neves invited Santos Carvalho to visit and offer "friendly" suggestions. That visit turned into a construction job. What the minister has described as simple work, done informally on weekends without a written contract, expanded to include a small structure, what the minister described as a water tank, but which several outlets have reported functioned as a swimming pool, and a parking area. Sol has reported work on two separate family properties in Odemira; Neves has said Santos Carvalho carried out "some interventions" on only one property he owns. CNN Portugal has separately reported finding materials and branded equipment at the site linked to a different, now-insolvent company also tied to Santos Carvalho, raising further questions the minister hasn't yet directly addressed.

Payment for the work ran through Alcampos, a small company in the name of Neves's wife, which Neves has described as a €500 sole proprietorship originally meant for a rural tourism venture that "never had activity." According to reporting by the Observador, Alcampos received 108 invoices from 13 different companies between February 2024 and June 2026, totalling just over €23,000, of which Construbarcelos's share was the largest single-company total: two invoices of €2,500 each, dated February 2025. Neves has estimated the eventual full cost of the Odemira work at €20,000 to €25,000, said the €5,000 already paid covered materials and working capital, and said the relevant invoices have been declared to Portugal's tax authority. He has offered to make the invoices public if he judges it "still necessary," but had not done so as of the most recent reporting.

Separately, reporting by the investigative outlet Página Um has found that of 14 companies where Santos Carvalho has appeared as founder, partner or manager over the years, at least six were later declared insolvent by Portuguese courts, and another six were dissolved, liquidated or closed. Construbarcelos itself, founded around 2015, restructured into its current sole-proprietor form in 2019, with just €1,000 in share capital, is flagged by commercial-risk analysts as high-risk for credit and litigation, partly due to pending supplier-debt cases in the Porto and Braga court districts.

Where things stand

The facts already on the public record are significant enough on their own: a construction company that received public contracts from the PJ, later did private renovation work on the minister's own property, questions about some of those public contracts, and now a PJ inquiry into how evidence from a major drug-trafficking case ended up at that same company's premises. None of those facts establishes criminal wrongdoing by the minister, and he has denied any wrongdoing at every stage. The PJ inquiry remains ongoing, and Portugal Dispatch will follow it and any further reporting as it develops.