André Ventura, leader of the Chega party, says his parliamentary office at the Assembly of the Republic in Lisbon was ransacked sometime Monday evening, and that documents related to a parliamentary inquiry, along with two USB drives, went missing. The Judiciary Police's counterterrorism unit (Unidade Nacional Contraterrorismo) has taken over the investigation.
Ventura posted photos of the office on social media Tuesday morning showing drawers open, cabinets disturbed, and documents and papers scattered across the floor. He described the episode as representing "grau zero," or rock bottom, for Portuguese democracy, and said he did not yet know whether anything had actually been stolen when he first made the post. He later denied, when asked directly, that the incident had been staged.
Ventura said the missing documents fell into two groups: one related to a parliamentary inquiry commission his party is preparing into Luís Neves, the current Interior Minister and former national director of the Judiciary Police, and another described as political information connected to the Prime Minister's office, which Ventura said was already more than a year old.
A rule requiring locked doors, issued four days earlier
Correio da Manhã reported that the office door showed no signs of being broken into or forced open. Ventura, both in a subsequent interview and again at a press conference, said the office is typically left unlocked, describing this as standard practice across the entire section of the Assembly used by Chega's parliamentary group given how late the party's staff often work, not something unique to his own office that night.
Observador reported that four days before the incident, on July 24, the Assembly's Administrative Board (Conselho de Administração) circulated an internal notice on ARNET, the Assembly's staff intranet, tightening the rules for remaining in the building outside normal hours. Among the new requirements: office doors had to be kept locked. By Ventura's own account, Chega's offices were not locked on the night of the incident.
Multiple outlets, including Observador, note a complicating factor: there are no security cameras inside the Assembly of the Republic, only exterior ones covering the building's approaches. Whatever happened inside the office was not captured on camera.
A narrower timeline than first assumed
Emídio Guerreiro, president of the Assembly's Administrative Board, told Rádio Observador that whoever was responsible could only have entered before 9:30 p.m. Monday, since that is when Parliament's last GNR security round of the night takes place, and he said he excludes the possibility that anyone entered overnight. Observador reported that Ventura left the office at around 7 p.m. that evening.
Correio da Manhã reported that Francisco Gomes, a Chega MP elected from Madeira, was the first party member to arrive the next morning, and that a cleaning employee and a GNR officer were already on scene by the time he got there. Diário de Notícias and other outlets place that discovery at approximately 6:30 to 7 a.m., when the cleaning employee raised the alert with Assembly security.
Gomes told Correio da Manhã by phone that arriving early is his habit and that Parliament's entry logs would confirm it, and said he found the door "half-open," with papers visible on the floor.
Open questions from SIC's reporting
SIC Notícias also reported several details that have not been independently confirmed elsewhere. It said security camera recordings show Gomes arriving shortly after cleaning staff, and that he told investigators he had gone to the parliamentary group's premises to record a video for TikTok. A separate outlet, JM Madeira, reported that the video Gomes ultimately published does not show the room in question. SIC also reported, citing sources close to the investigation, that Ventura told journalists a USB drive containing information relevant to the inquiry commission had disappeared, but that he did not report that specific detail to the PJ. Portugal Dispatch has not independently verified this last claim, which comes from SIC's reporting alone.
SIC also reported that MPs from other parties have raised questions about the sequence of events: why a member of parliament would travel to Lisbon so early during the Assembly's summer recess, when there is no scheduled parliamentary business, and go directly past the party leader's office rather than straight to the group's general premises.
Political reaction
Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, asked about the case by reporters in São João da Madeira, said he had no direct knowledge of what happened but that any act of vandalism against a sovereign body's premises "is inconceivable in a mature democracy like Portugal's" and should be investigated quickly and conclusively.
José Luís Carneiro, secretary-general of the opposition Socialist Party, called for a swift investigation, then added, unprompted, that his own parliamentary office is always locked when he isn't in it, calling that a personal security procedure that should always be followed. Asked directly whether he was suggesting Ventura had been careless, Carneiro did not answer the question, repeating only that he "always locked" his own office. He referred broader questions about Parliament's security to the Assembly's president, José Pedro Aguiar-Branco.
Ventura has said he will formally ask the Assembly to increase security in that section of the building, including installing cameras, and said this was not the first time he had received what he described as threats near his office.
The Assembly's security service said it isolated the area and notified the PJ as soon as it learned of the incident, following standard procedure. As of Tuesday, the PJ had not released any findings, and no suspects had been publicly identified. Investigators had also not publicly said whether anything had in fact been removed from the office, or whether the disturbance was linked to an attempted theft. Portugal Dispatch will update this story as the investigation develops.